Review: SEAGULL: TRUE STORY, Marylebone Theatre

About halfway through the second act, the key problem (and there are a few) with Alexander Molochnikov and Eli Rarey’s cri de coeur, Seagull: True Story dawned on me. It should be a musical! 

Not only would it fit well into that format’s well established backstage genre, it would make it easier to forgive the torrent of issues jammed into a story that can’t quite sustain them. It would also allow the best elements of the show - Fedor Zhuravlev and Noize MC’s songs and Ohad Mazor’s extraordinary choreography - to shine. As it is, we have all the energy, and all the drawbacks, of “Let’s put on a show” MT, without a proper score’s capacity to deepen emotions and slow down the book’s furious pace.

It’s (don’t groan now) meta from the start. Andrey Burkovskiy, a very Emcee-like MC, later a very Emcee-like unreliably mendacious producer in a production in which most actors multi-role, breaks the fourth wall from the very start, telling us we’re in the prestigious Moscow Arts Theatre in February 2022. In this prestigious venue, with a painting of a seagull on the curtain metaphorically monitoring standards, bright young director, Kon, is rehearsing his re-imagining of the most revered of Russian plays, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, with his mother, the celebrated actress Olga, in the lead. Already, for some in the stalls at least, a parallel between the play’s real life and Chekhov’s characters whom they are portraying becomes evident - it won’t be the last.

Then real, real life crashes into the rarified atmosphere of artistic work. Everything changes on 24 February. As the enormity of Putin’s ‘special military operation’ dawns on the cast and creatives working at the very centre of the Russian state’s cultural past, present and future, the group falls apart. Kon denounces the invasion on social media and flees to New York; Olga, confident of her protection from high level contacts stays; Anton, the sardonic poetry-writing dramaturg, refuses to read an opening night statement of retraction and is sent to the modern Gulag; producer, Yuri, just rolls with what the regime requires.

After more than enough material for a full length play, we’re only at the interval, after which Kon is in New York, robbed on the subway (natch), falling for the enigmatic Nico (of course, Nico) and mounting a DIY version of his The Seagull that proves an underground hit propelling him and Nico into stardom in the city that never sleeps. Meanwhile, Olga wants him to come home, Anton is suffering in the camp and war rages on. 

Daniel Boyd plays Kon, partly based on Molochnikov’s own experiences, as a man permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown, home neither in Putin’s Russia nor Trump’s New York - many non-exiles will know how he feels. Ingeborga Dapkunaite lends Olga an imperious if flighty presence, a woman whose beauty, talent and charisma have always allowed her to pick a path through politics and she’s doing so again. 

Nico is a sexy chancer and, long before she chooses Burkovskiy’s grifter producer, Barry, over the gifted artist, Kon, we know which way she’s headed, not so much #MeToo as #MePlease. Elan Zafir, when not looking distractingly like a young Clive James, shows the price to pay for holding on to principles in unprincipled times as the poet Anton.   

There’s just too many ideas presented at breakneck pace for the show to breathe the oxygen it needs to flourish. No sooner have you smirked at a perceptive point linking Russia and the United States’ far too similar leaders, than there’s a question raised about the nature of art in dysfunctional societies or an examination of who exactly gets to call themselves an artist anyway. No idea lingers long enough to be explored - you hanker for a bit of Chekhov’s masterly ability to have nothing and everything happening all at once - and, in assessing the production, it feels like playing Guitar Hero with one, two, three, four and five star moments hurtling towards you! 

Nevertheless, it is pleasing to have this off-Broadway hit in London, which definitely needs more of its ambition and continual refusal to talk down to its audience, and at a theatre large enough for its scale and movement to come through - jeez, the ensemble cast work hard. But, as I learned in the early 80s, when experimental, innovative productions like this were a regular presence on Channel Four, in cinemas and on stage, a little of the avant garde goes a long way. Running at almost two and a half hours on press night, there was a lot of the avant garde. And a lot of a lot more too. 

If you felt that the Academy Award winning movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, had just too many longeurs, then this is the show for you!

Seagull:True Story at the Marylebone Theatre until 12 October

Photo Credits: Mark Senior