The Seagull

The Seagull by Anton Cechov resumes “flight” for an extended and long-awaited tour staged by the Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius.

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov resumed “flight” once more for an extended and long-awaited tour staged by the Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius. Opening in  the autumn of 2001 in St. Petersburg, the production went on to tour numerous Italian cities between October 2001 and February 2002. This new work adds to the director’s catalogue of  re-readings of Chekhov which began in 1978 with his production of Ivanov and was followed  by two further memorable productions - Uncle Vanja, in 1981 and Three Sisters, in 1996.
This production of the play however, co-produced by Css of Udine and the Teatro Metastasio of Prato,  has a particular history and genesis as it represents the development of a work initiated in 2000 during the ninth edition of l'Ecole des Maitres, the annual travelling drama school which offers specialist courses to European actors training in theatre schools and academies in Italy, France, Belgium and Portugal. The assignment was also a first for the Lithuanian maestro himself, who took on the task of working with a group of actors who, unlike his company back in Vilnius, he was not only unfamiliar with but who were also from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and with whom he was to attempt to stage a production that would develop day by day during the course of the training programme. Once again, as in previous productions,  this rendition of The Seagull is imprinted with Nekrosius’ unmistakable hallmarks. His is a theatre that blends and finds continuous strength in the elements of nature - in water, fire, the wind - a theatre that is rich in details and in the inventiveness of its sets, which, with disarming simplicity, succeed in highlighting and placing the hidden subplots of feelings and sentiment at centre stage in every production. Nekrosius’ Il gabbiano develops like a waltz, a waltz of meetings, promises and farewells which are danced along the shores of a lake which is evoked with a single row of twenty metal buckets filled with water. A frying pan represents the moon, a cluster of green apples hangs like a lamp, from the ceiling, and when Konstantin’s little theatre is struck by a premonitory wind it is not white birch trees that sway in the gust but a series of brightly coloured children’s windmills. And Nina’s disappearance and childlike hopes and impulses are, within tormented Treplev’s embrace, an unforgettable flight.