Review: THE SEAGULL 73458 at Taganka Theatre

It's always night-time on the smoky, moonlit stage of The Seagull 73458 at Moscow's Taganka Theatre. Trigorin pours another drink for Masha, the servant girl. Then he pours her another. "Girls drink more than you think," she says, but soon, she's lost her wits.

It's Chekhov's The Seagull, but it's not. In Dainius Kazlauskas's adaptation of the Russian classic, the source material has been cut up and taped together into something like a symphony, with phrases of the original text and new lines repeating here, in the first act, here in the third act. A gunshot marks the start of the show. It will ring out again and again throughout the night, punctuating the music and the movement and jostling the audience awake.

The rhythm of 73458 is slow and sinister. If you know The Seagull - and you are in Moscow, so you know The Seagull - you may not recognize the faces in front of you. Vasily Uryevsky as Trigorin, normally the quiet voice of wisdom, pours each drink and kisses each woman with the grin of a man who knows what will happen next. Alexander Metolkin finds perversity in Konstain's naivete, throwing his whole body at the feet of Nina, the ingenue, played by Daria Avratinskaya, who drinks in adoration but can't be bothered to return it. They are broken, these young people, and there's a certain kind of pleasure in watching them break each other.

It's a dark dream, remembered in flashes, cast in shadows. Red flames, clear vodka, white feathers. The moon waxes and wanes, stars twinkle, and, somewhere, an old man is reciting poetry. "The seagull, seven, three, four, five, eight." There's a mystery here, but there's truth, also, and it's a sad truth. Let the mystery land somewhere far away, we already know enough.

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