Review: Seagull: True Story (Marylebone Theatre)

Review by Stephen Gilchrist

⭐️⭐️⭐️

There is nothing new under the Sun. Truly, there isn’t. First presented at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York earlier this year, Seagull: True Story now flies into London for a revised version at Marylebone Theatre. Essentially, the play is a semi-fictionalised take on the experiences of exiled Russian director Alexander Molochnikov, who created and directed this piece.

The idea behind experimental theatre is to provoke thought and evoke emotions through innovative approaches, such as breaking the fourth wall, utilizing abstract staging with an emphasis on movement and physicality as primary storytelling tools. It also incorporates elements of dance, mime, and acrobatics. And by golly, there is a lot of all this in Seagull. Actors declaim, address, and immerse the audience, throwing themselves about to Ohad Mazor’s choreography. There is an awful lot of running around. But to what end? It’s all very Brechtian.

There is a show within a show within a show. The protagonist Kon (Molochnikov’s alter ego) is obsessed with directing a radical production of Chekhov’s The Seagull ( the principal character of which is Konstantine) at Stanislavsky’s Moscow Arts Theatre. His mother is a famous actress who echoes Konstantine’s mother in the Chekhov play. As they rehearse in 2022, Russia invades Ukraine, and the outraged Kon now wants to restyle his production to concentrate on Freedom. His mother is much more laissez-faire and doesn’t want to rock the political boat since the authorities are unimpressed and are likely to close the show down. Kon and his friend Anton publicly denounce the Kremlin and its autocratic regime, and, as a result, Kon leaves for New York before he can be arrested.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is. You may remember the background to the 1937 Marc Blitzstein show The Cradle Will Rock. This controversial musical was a political allegory about corruption and labour, and resulted in the 1999 film, which dramatized the famous true story of its attempted censorship and a defiant, historic opening night performance. The play, originally produced for the Federal Theatre Project and directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by political opponents, forcing Welles and his cast to find an empty theatre to stage the show.

As I say, nothing new under the sun, since it was only about eighteen months ago that the Almeida Theatre produced Cold War, a musical, based on Paweł Pawlikowski's Academy Award-nominated film of the same name.  It concerned a composer who escaped Poland under Communism to gain greater artistic freedom, only to discover his artistic sensitivities and integrity hopelessly compromised in a ‘free Europe’.

You can see that the themes are several: freedom of expression under fire, artistic integrity compromised, divided nationalistic loyalties, and so on. There is also a rather obvious analogy drawn with the current Trump regime with its suggested oppression of immigrants, censorship, and a general dictatorial style of government 

I don’t wish to be unkind about this show since its heart is in the right place and the production was slick, fluid, and well-staged. The set design by Alexander Shishkin was imaginative and even innovative, to an extent, as was the lighting by Alex Musgrave. In what I would describe as quite a busy show, the stage management crew deserves credit of their own.

Seagull True Story is full of energetic performances, with Daniel Boyd displaying a winning personality as Kon, with Ingeborga Dapkunaite as his suitably disdainful mother. Elsewhere, Andrey Burkovsky was entertaining as an MC, and Elan Zafir proved rather affecting as Anton. 

There was much going on all the time to the extent that sometimes it was difficult to focus on the point that writer Eli Rarey was trying to make, but by and large, the show did not overstay its welcome and was well received on press night by an exceptionally enthusiastic audience. It may not be anything we haven’t seen before, but what it does, it does extremely well.

Seagull True Story plays at Marylebone Theatre until 11^th October. Tickets from https://allthatdazzles.londontheatredirect.com/play/seagull-true-story-tickets

Photos by Mark Senior