STAGE THE SEAGULL
★★★★
Harold Pinter Theatre until September 10 haroldpintertheatre.co.uk
Barefoot actors sit on plastic chairs in a giant chipboard crate. Doing Chekhov. My soul shrivelled with dread at the sight. And yet...
Headlined by Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke, this 1895 play about creative types and their assorted friends, lovers and retainers at an isolated country retreat has been smartly updated by Anya Reiss and Jamie Lloyd. However the themes of unrequited love, loneliness, ego and that gnawing sense of one’s own inadequacies remain universal and timeless.
Clarke (and her incredibly expressive eyebrows!) delights as naive aspiring actress Nina. She’s perfectly pitted against the mesmerising Indira Varma’s drolly waspish fading star Arkadina, rejecting Arkadina’s melancholy, pretentious playwright son Konstantin (Daniel Monks) and running off with the diva’s young lover, the tormented and shallow ‘middlebrow writer’ Trigorin (Tom Rhys Harries).
The excellent cast bear and bare their own personal tragedies, yet brisk pacing and barbed humour prevent it from becoming a dreary trudge, even as the pathos and painful revelations pitilessly and inexorably build.
With everyone always on stage and miked up – their every whisper, mutter and aside audible – intimacy and claustrophobia battle beautifully. A shame it falters with a fumbled and rather unclear final scene.