If this approach to the play verges on the moralistic, it also feels right given Soulpepper’s – to use the codeword – problematic history with Chekhov. I’ve never seen more unlikeable versions of the mid-career artists Irina and Boris, whose attitudes toward the younger artists Konstantin and Nina are destructive and predatory rather than nurturing, than the ones incarnated by Monteith and Bhaneja here. This play is also about the old eating the young – and that comes through perhaps loudest and clearest and sharpest of all in Brooks’ production.
Brooks perfectly calibrates the avant garde aesthetics of the play within the play (hand-held mics, white make-up) to split the off-stage audience, too. Are Konstantin and Irina clashing about art at all – or is their fight really about the jealousy the son feels toward his single mother’s new beau Boris (Raoul Bhaneja, busting all the character’s cliché), a successful “man of letters” who has Nina in awe?Īnd is Konstantin’s play really that bad – or is it maybe really good? The on-stage audience – all those ancillary Chekhov characters that make his plays so rich, such as culture-loving, roughneck farm manager (Randy Hughson) and his ostentatiously depressed, yet full-of-love daughter (Ellie Ellwand) – have different opinions. The enduring genius of Chekhov’s opening scene is in its ambiguity. (Irina shrugs she thought she was at a relaxed performance.) Instead, Irina puts on her own performance in the audience during the show, and after one too many irreverent interjections, Konstantin cancels the end of his play in a pique.
He especially wants unconditional love from his actor mother, Irina (Michelle Monteith astounding), whose supposedly old-fashioned style he openly reviles. The young playwright/director wants to épater his bourgeois family and friends with a new form of theatre that contains a repudiation of their old ones – but also, and this is very 2023, wants to be highly praised for doing so. Now on stage in a cheeky and then cutthroat contemporary production by director Daniel Brooks at Soulpepper, the play begins out on a farm in the country where would-be radical writer Konstantin (Paolo Santalucia, sporting a hipster riff on a Three Stooges haircut) is putting on an outdoor performance starring his girlfriend-next-door, Nina (Hailey Gillis), with a dual purpose. Here comes one of Anton Chekhov’s major works again for a third time this Toronto theatre season, once again reminding us that there is little all that new about our declining times.įor instance, if you think audience misbehaviour leading to a play being stopped is a postpandemic phenomenon, then you obviously have forgotten about The Seagull. Venue: Yonge Centre for the Performing Arts.Actors: Michelle Monteith, Paolo Santalucia, Hailey Gillis and Raoul Bhaneja.Written by: Anton Chekhov, in a new version by Simon Stephens.
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