the dogs howl
by Douglas Messerli
Anton Chekov The Seagull, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royce Hall, University of
California, Los Angeles / October 28, 2007
Far more than the seagull (which I might remind the reader is itself a
rather noisy, barking bird—at least most mornings in my Los Angeles
neighborhood), Anton Chekov’s metaphor of the howling dog dominates his four-act
“comedy.” If the young Nina is
ruthlessly transformed by the end of the play into a dead seagull, all of
Chekov’s characters are clearly howling dogs, beasts who endlessly cry out for
love and attention
Arkadina’s son, Konstantin, having grown up in a world of important
figures of the day, feels he has no identity and has made little contribution
to the world. He desperately seeks a way to please his mother by presenting his
own play. The audience—on stage and off—are never permitted to witness the
whole of his work, but it clearly is the writing of an amateur, an abstract
howl of sorrow set in a bleak holocaust of the future where “men, lions, eagles
and partridges, antlered deer, geese, spiders, silent fish which live in the
water, starfish and organisms invisible to the eye—in short, all life…” has
vanished, leaving only the red eye of the sulphurous- smelling demon of
Konstantin’s play in its place.
The young actress of this piece, Konstantin’s beloved Nina, has not yet
learned to howl—although she warns Konstantin not to stand, as he threatens to,
by her window garden for fear that her dog, Trésor, will bark. Her unfortunate
situation is well known, however, by the surrounding adults: her mother has
left her large estate to Nina’s father, who having remarried, keeps a close
watch over his now disinherited daughter. By play’s end, moreover, she too will
discover how to growl, howling out her sad tale to Konstantin before she leaves
him forever for a career on the stage. Might she, in the future, become an
Arkadina, a Duse, a Bernhardt?
Interrupting her son’s literary contribution, Arkadina is perhaps the
most selfish of Chekhov’s beasts, a penurious, self-enchanted actress who
insists upon being the center of everyone’s attentions while serving them up
tales of her own success. Trigorin, with whom she is having an affair, is a
successful novelist, but as he describes himself later to Nina, he uses all
others in his never-ending cycle of transforming life into words. Any stray
image, any passing expression he hears becomes grist for the mill of his
creative endeavor. It is he who compares Nina to the dead seagull Konstantin
has laid at her feet, and after using the metaphor for his writing and actually
enacting the transformation in real life—destroying the innocent girl in a
self-serving sexual relationship, he utterly forgets the original event.
Even the minor characters of The
Seagull reveal their bestial behaviors. Masha is desperately infatuated
with Konstantin, while her mother, Polina, is still in love with Dorn, the
local doctor, who evidently was the center of many women’s attentions early in
his life. Dorn lives in his memories without attending to the present.
Medvedneko is a nebbish without any sense of self-worth, Masha’s father
Shamrayev, an utter bore.
In short, these beasts, locked away for the summer in a country estate,
sniff out one another as they bray to the skies for relief. Only Sorin can
comfortably sleep, a condition into which he falls continuously throughout the
play, while awaking each time as if into a nightmare.
Since the characters of Chehkov’s play, accordingly, each represent a
version of the same thing, it is crucial that the company work not just as a
closely-knit ensemble, but that their acting talents are relatively equal.
Medvedneko must be as fearfully intimidated as Arkadina is fearlessly
intimidating. Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, which I
witnessed at UCLA on October 28, 2007, was a failure on several levels.
Misinterpreting the confrontation throughout the play of peasant life against
the largely imagined world of the artistes,
Nunn drudged up British class distinctions, insisting Masha, Medvedneko, and
others speak in a kind pigeon-Cockney while the artists spoke “proper English,”
drawing distinctions between Chekhov’s characters that do not appear—at least
in my reading—in the original.
Some of the actors, particularly the young ingénue Romola Garai (playing
Nina), simply did not have the acting abilities of more minor figures, such as
William Gaunt’s Sorin—who alternated with Ian McKellen (who was also performing
in Lear). While as a character Nina
may be unable to act, as an actress her performance must match the level of the
others of the cast or the dreadful chorus of these braying dogs becomes
occasional howls alternating with yaps.
Finally, the Royal Shakespeare Company literalized Konstantin’s early
suicide attempt by forcing characters and audience to hear the gun go off—an
event that does not occur in the original—tragically prefiguring the final
shriek of the gun.
How much better, I was reminded, was the American production from the
1974 Williamstown Theatre Festival, starring a very young Frank Langella,
Blythe Danner, Olympia Dukakis, Lee Grant, Kevin McCarthy, and Marian Mercer—a
splendid cast working as a true ensemble—a production preserved on tape.
Los
Angeles, December 9, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).
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