The bird suddenly feels less like a late 19th-century playwright’s metaphor than an emblem of our times – all the generational division, grief, rage and hope. The final image finds the entire cast arranged in the shape of a seagull, Monks’ doomed, suicidal Konstantin at its head. Jason Barnett smoulders with mutinous frustration as estate manager Shamrayev, with Sophie Wu tragi-comic as his depressive emo daughter Masha, and Robert Glenister stifling in quiet, self-annihilating futility as Arkadina’s ageing, ailing brother Sorin. The fractured exchanges are faintly Sally Rooneyish as connections are made and missed, and the atmosphere is one of sickly lethargy, in which failed romances and bitter resentments fester. Tumbling woozily into infatuation, Clarke is dazzlingly luminous: each tiny tenderness Rhys Harries utters makes her eyes bigger and hungrier, and her face glow brighter, as if he’s turning up a dimmer switch. She’s an unwitting affront to Varma’s envious Arkadina a silken narcissist capable of shocking viciousness, Arkadina moves into manipulative overdrive when she spies Nina’s attraction to her own buff, rudderless young lover, popular novelist Trigorin (Tom Rhys Harries). Konstantin hopelessly adores Clarke’s fragile, almost childlike Nina, an aspiring actor who delicately combines youthful awkwardness with a muted, secret confidence in her own loveliness, and is just learning its power. It’s a broken, brilliant Seagull – and it flies (Photo: Marc Brenner) It’s the sort of set that would meet the approval of novice playwright Konstantin (Daniel Monks), who scorns cultural gatekeeping and the conventional, commercial theatre that has made a star of his mother, Indira Varma’s lethally glamorous Arkadina. Soutra Gilmour imprisons the actors, slumped on plastic chairs, in a bare fluorescent-lit plywood box post-interval it’s part dismantled, as if the characters might be breaking free, reaching towards some new future – but all we can see beyond is darkness. It’s scintillatingly meta, its ingenuity featherlight. And the uncompromising staging itself – so real, yet so overtly, starkly theatrical – becomes an eloquent strand in the play’s arguments about art and authenticity. What’s left is pitilessly intense, the heartbreak, fear, cruelty and longing laid bare. Props, scenic clutter, even superfluous movement are stripped away. But Lloyd goes much further, not only plucking this bird’s plumage, but ripping off its skin too. Anya Reiss’s adaptation is a robust, frankly spoken, contemporary British update.
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