Dundee Rep, under Hamish Glen, has created something unique in Britain: a permanent company of 14 actors that is now in its third consecutive season. The result is a molten ensemble of the kind you associate with mainland Europe. And the highest tribute I can pay this astonishing Scottish troupe is that it triumphs over the often wilful eccentricities of Lithuanian Rimas Tuminas, who has been imported to direct The Seagull in the Tom Stoppard version.
Tuminas and his designer, Adomas Jacovskis, pull off some striking visual effects. The opening scene, in which Konstantin stages his play in Sorin's park, is beautifully mounted. Candles are ritually placed on a downstage log. The spectators enter in a phalanx bearing wooden chairs and sit upstage, allowing us to see their shifting reactions to Konstantin's symbolist work. And, after Arkadina has thoughtlessly ruined it, a rough curtain is drawn across the stage through which we glimpse the resulting chaos.
But Chekhov's special genius is for showing the way drama emerges through the flux of daily life - a point overlooked by Tuminas, whose tendency, in the rest of the production, is to hammer home his points. Instead of being an almost casual act of seduction, Trigorin's lecture to Nina on the mundane nature of the literary life is turned into a manic rant. Trigorin's crucial return at the end of the third act to make an assignation with Nina is also sacrificed to achieve a spectacular exit on a luggage-laden trolley. And Chekhov's astonishing low-key climax, in which Konstantin's suicide is whisperingly revealed, is trumped by the concurrent death of the aged Sorin.
Theatricality rather than reality is the keynote of Tuminas's production, a point symbolised by the constant background music of Latenas Faustas, which varies from fairground jauntiness to pianistic plangency. But, although the production often infuriated me, I concede that Tuminas gets impressive performances from his Scottish cast. Meg Fraser's Masha becomes a pivotal figure reduced to visceral howls of pain by her thwarted love for Konstantin. John Buick's Sorin is also an angry, embittered character whose disappointment with life leads him to give the finger to Sandy Neilson's vainly consoling Dorn. And, from the start, you feel the lurking sexual rivalry between Irene Macdougall's grandstanding Arkadina and Emily Winter's ardent Nina.
Something extraordinary is clearly happening in Dundee, even if Tuminas's Seagull misses the diurnal materiality that is a vital part of Chekhov's mastery.
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