Writer: Eli Rarey
Director: Alexander Molochnikov
Does true artistic freedom exist anywhere in the world, especially if the artist wants to be successful? Eli Rarey’s Seagull: True Story, which transfers to the Marylebone Theatre from New York, compares the opportunities a young Russian director has to present his take on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull first in Russia and then in the United States, discovering that his creativity is channelled largely into different forms of compliance with rules he doesn’t understand. Given an irreverent vaudevillian staging by director Alexander Molochnikov, the company find plenty of parallels between the characters they are performing and the theatrical life they inhabit.
Rehearsing at the prestigious Moscow Arts Theatre in 2022, rising star Kon (Daniel Boyd) is directing his mother Olga (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) as Arkadina in The Seagull, a play that he is obsessed with. As the political temperature rises and war begins, Kon struggles to retain his neutrality when his production is forced to par back its radical approach. Three years later in America, he tries again with a group of non-actors in a makeshift setting, but is potential fame worth leaving his homeland for?
Seagull: True Story really does feel like two slightly separate satirical commentaries on the theatrical process in both Russia and America, which makes the two halves of this play slightly uneven. It begins well, enjoying the mock seriousness of Kon’s vision by taking sly pot shots at directors’ theatre, revelling in the high concept tricks that this director employs to tell his story, and there are some very entertaining rehearsal scenes involving a lot of plastic sheeting and bags that become metaphors for all kinds of things that are not important except for appreciative mockery.
But the earnestness of the devices is matched by a deep understanding of Chekhov and Kon’s obsession with the work which is challenged by the encroaching boundaries of the State creeping into the theatre, preventing the actors from performing the work as they would like to. Who complies and who resists becomes a pointed division in the company, and Rarey charts the parallels with Chekhov’s play as they are increasingly restricted.
The section in America after the interval works less well as Kon spends more time in New York society and not in the play itself, with scenes set in gloomy subway stations and in clubs that make the country seem considerably less hospitable than Russia did in Act One. The version of The Seagull Kon produces here is equally silly and subversive with in-jokes about basement theatres and callous producers, but as Kon’s story takes over, the connection to Chekhov’s work feels less worked through, and beyond a version of the Nina-Trigorin-Kosta triangle in which Kon’s actress girlfriend Nico (Stella Baker) leaves him for a big-shot producer, it has far less to say about the political influences that shape theatre in the USA.
Rarey places this all inside a bigger story narrated by an MC who also plays the theatre manager in Russia and producer in New York (Andrev Burkovskiv), while director Molochnikov creates a cabaret jauntiness that is consistently engaging. Seagull: True Story has a point to make about the luxury of theatre in times of war and the platform for resistance it provides, but as Kon moves to a new country, that point gets a little lost in the commercial dazzle of America.
Runs until 12 October 2025
