Life and art rub together like two pebbles in a pocket in Chekhov's play, a sublime confection of comedy and tragedy that has to be played for absolute truth if it is going to uncover and lay bare the lies that these people tell themselves and each other. This is a play about dissembling: the self-absorbed actress Arkadina turns her whole life into a performance, the acclaimed writer Trigorin is a moral coward in his private life; the young Nina -the seagull of the title - is a girl with the stars in her eyes destroyed because of her romantic illusions. Their foibles may make us laugh, but any staging also has to be hard enough to make us understand that Konstantin's final gesture is not one of melodrama but the actions of man who utterly despairs of living.
None of this quite comes off in a production by actor-turned-director Robert Bowman that has the advantage of Tom Stoppard's wonderfully serviceable translation and occasional moments of piercing lucidity that hint at what this evening might have been given more time and experience. When Annabelle Apsion's dumpy, middle-aged Arkadina girlishly perches on Trigorin's lap, we see this not as an act of tenderness but one of ownership; similarly her vanity is exposed when she attempts to read without glasses, holding the book several feet from her nose. The production needs much, much more detail like this to really make the characters live and breathe and make us recognise ourselves in them.
Instead, from the opening moments, when the stage is dominated by a violin-playing peasant, we get one of those traditional, slightly nostalgic and handsome versions of Chekhov that have been knocking around regional theatres for decades and which the young Konstantin, with his revolutionary ideas about theatre form, would surely despise. The staging of the first play-within-a-play scene is clumsy, and throughout designer Anthony Macilwaine provides an excess of set, all of which has to be shifted around.
After a shaky start, things look up, although the production would have a chance of being more than just solid if only all the performances were as good as Richard Henders' puppyish Konstantin and Siwan Morris's despairing Marsha. Scott Handy is very good too as Trigorin, hinting at a corroding self-knowledge beneath the charm. But this is a play that demands superlative ensemble playing and there are too many weak links in the chain. If the play survives, it is less to do with the staging and more because of Chekhov's superb crafting and unflinching honesty.
· Until November 26. Box office: 0117 987 7877.
