The Seagull has (crash) landed...
Emilia swaps dragons for a bird in a cardboard box
The Theatre, Seagull London) (Harold Pinter Verdict: Game of drones ★★III Beauty And The Beast (London Palladium) Verdict: Beauty of a Beast ★★★★★
BE SURE to hide any sharps or firearms you may keep at home, lest you turn to them in desperation at the end of this suicide drama starring Emilia Clarke from Game Of Thrones.
Celebrity director Jamie Lloyd has taken Anton Chekhov’s 19th-century Russian classic — which has been freely re-written in modern English by Anya Reiss — and turned it into a mirthless trudge from dismal gloom to downright despair.
There are some seriously good actors on parade here, in the story of a famous actress Arkadina (Indira Varma) on holiday in the country with her writer-lover Trigorin (Tom Rhys Harries), who himself falls in love with an aspiring young actress (Clarke). So we might have hoped for more of Lloyd’s production, set on an MDF stage with green stacking chairs. But it offers all the visual interest of a cardboard box.
What’s worse, with the entire — barefoot — cast amplified by stickon microphones, they’re encouraged to whisper their litany of lifetime woes to one another, rendering an already sullen set-up impenetrably morose. It’s not so much Game Of Thrones as Game Of Drones.
Mystifyingly, despite being the box-office draw, Clarke’s turn as Nina is, in fact, a supporting role. She is at first starstruck by the famous writer Trigorin; then brutally cast aside by him before she appears in the final scene.
Clarke does little more than pamper Trigorin with girlish smiles and, much later, furrow her brow to signify her shock at being discarded. Those eyebrows are, however, positively gymnastic, performing back bends, high jumps and somersaults to register intrigue, surprise and confusion.
The heroism of Clarke’s character Daenerys Targaryen in Game Of Thrones is a distant memory, and at the age of 35 she might even have been expected to take the leading role of Arkadina. That falls to Varma (another GoT graduate), who is imperiously contemptuous of all she surveys — especially her would-be writer son Konstantin (Daniel Monks).
His mother’s scorn and Nina’s rejection drive Konstantin to two suicide bids, and this clinical depression sets the grim tone.
It is, of course, entirely welcome to see a disabled actor such as Monks, who is paralysed on his right side following a spinal tumour as a child, playing a traditionally able-bodied role. But with his character already having abandoned hope in relation to his mother and her lover at the start, all Lloyd’s direction asks of him is to melt in self-pity and moisten his cheeks with tears.
As his rival Trigorin, Harries is more airhead toyboy than tortured charmer. Robert Glenister, as Arkadina’s sleepy brother, Sorin, is legitimately allowed to nod off at various points in proceedings (lucky chap). At other times we must be grateful for his rueful optimism — it’s as close as we get to a flicker of hope.
Indeed, the production is almost comically miserable — we even get Rachmaninoff’s doom-laden Prelude in C-sharp Minor as an overture to Konstantin’s desolation.
■ HAPPILY, Disney’s Beauty And The Beast is the perfect antidote
to The Seagull’s lake of misery. At the end of a nationwide tour that saw Emmanuel Kojo ditched from the show for taking his role as the Beast too seriously with ‘inappropriate’ remarks to women in the wings, it is now gloriously installed in the London Palladium.
The adaptation packs all the joy of the animated movie and Matt West’s production adds magic of its own — including the head of what appears to be a real live boy in the teacup on a table with a see-through base.
From panto-ish beginnings, West’s show evolves into full feather-boa Broadway spectacle. And, thanks to projections from an overhead camera, the human crockery dancing in the dining room is a kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley delight.
As Beauty, Courtney Stapleton is completely under the spell of her character, Belle, with an innocent, thousand-mile stare. But she hits the high notes — and kicks the Can Can as well as the chorus girls.
Shaq Taylor as the Beast is a boorish alpha-male at first, but comes good with shy grunts and goofy charm. My favourite, though, is Gavin Lee as the candelabra Lumiere — a fusion of Liberace and Maurice Chevalier.