Druid Theatre Company is presenting the Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy’s 1981 adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 play in the haunting Coole Park, near the ruins of the renowned house. Under grey skies of a Galway twilight, we sit facing Francis O’Connor’s temporary wooden stage on which is set a smaller, temporary wooden stage, ready for the play-within-the-play. Director Garry Hynes’s new production of The Seagull is probably the most atmospheric I will ever see; also, I guess, the most theatrical.
“What has theatre to do with reality?” The question, not in Chekhov but introduced by Kilroy, is delivered by feted actor Isobel (Chekhov’s Arkadina), played by Eileen Walsh, who almost spits it out as she waits impatiently with a group of family and friends to watch her son Constantine (Jack Gleeson)’s new experimental play. Isobel rightly expects a counterblast to the sort of productions she stars in. “Oh, God,” she exclaims, as it starts, “one of those Celtic things!”
Kilroy relocates the action to an “estate in the west of Ireland in the latter part of the 19th century”. The resonances of Hynes’s choice of location are all but bouncing off the broken walls around us. Coole Park was once just such an estate. More than that, it was home to Lady Gregory who in 1899, with fellow dramatists Edward Martyn and WB Yeats, first dreamed of founding the Irish Literary Theatre just before Konstantin Stanislavsky had his first great success with his newly formed Moscow Art Theatre, directing The Seagull. These are not quasi-site specific, incidental details, for the location goes to the heart of the Chekhov/Kilroy play, in which theatre/fiction and reality are inextricably interdependent.
Constantine’s killing of the seagull and setting it at the feet of his actor, Lily, whom he loves, is both a symbolic act and a real, death-dealing action – the bloody bird shocking to see. An idea for a story sketched out by Isobel’s lover, the novelist Mr Aston, about a girl, a seagull and a destructive seduction becomes the reality of his relation with Lily. Marty Rea’s Aston balances charm against callous self-interest; as Lily, Agnes O’Casey effects a finely calibrated transition from innocence to experience. Isobel and Constantine flay each other verbally, fighting over theatre forms, exploiting their emotional states to probe artistic possibilities. Intense, histrionic performances from Walsh and Gleeson, at first overwhelming, build to an extraordinary crescendo of tortured, mother-son intimacy after Constantine’s attempted suicide; they come to seem like one being reflected in the shards of a broken mirror.
Hynes’s artistically precise period production, with its shifting frames of reference, is both particular and universal; profoundly moving and thought-provoking.
The Seagull is at Coole Park, County Galway, until 21 August, and online on demand as part of GIAF (Galway international arts festival, 5-12 September
