Year:  2022

Director:  Jamie Lloyd

Release:  November 5, 2022

Distributor: Sharmill

Running time: 140 minutes

Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Emilia Clarke, Indira Varma, Tom Rhys, Sophie Wu, Daniel Monks, Robert Glanister

Intro:
Clarke is indeed mesmerisingly good. She has both the technique to play big and small and the sensitivity to make us really care about her fate in the hands of the callous young men who might just use her for their own ends.

Life is full of unmet desires and things we will always feel ambiguous about. We waste our youth, and we never quite feel fulfilled even when happiness seems within our grasp. Few artists understood this as profoundly or put it into characters as profoundly as the great Russian playwright and author Anton Chekhov. Chekhov was also a doctor and he saw a lot of human nature at its most fragile, but he resisted judging people for being vulnerable or deluded. Instead, he asks, aren’t we all a little like that?

The Seagull is the first of his most famous plays and it is a text that can be endlessly reinterpreted. Director Jamie Lloyd has approached the play in a way that is both fun, fluid and yet austere. Anyone who saw his much-heralded adaption of the Cyrano de Bergerac story will see why he is one of the hottest directors on the scene today.

He has used the adaption by Anya Reiss, which takes the basic script and moves in and out of it with certain exchanges and idioms that are deliberately outside of 19th Century. Lloyd has also made the choice to set the play in a bare stage with actors in modern dress moving the same plastic chairs in various formations according to the scenes. Yet somehow, it is a full play and does not come across as a read-through or rehearsal.

Given that the heart of Chekhov is in the exchanges, this stripping back works wonderfully. Even if you have never seen the play, the verbal descriptions and the tone and attitude of the players effortlessly conjures up the rest of ‘scene’. It is a bold and creative response that is clearly born of a deep love for the material. Of course, this puts a lot of pressure on the actors and the casting here deserves the highest praise. The ‘star’ – or at least the poster girl in one sense – is Emilia Clarke (of Game of Thrones fame). She plays the ‘ingenue’ Nina, a wide-eyed young woman with little real-life experience who longs to spread her wings. In a sense, she is a ‘seagull” happy in her element but vulnerable at the same time. Clarke is indeed mesmerisingly good. She has both the technique to play big and small and the sensitivity to make us really care about her fate in the hands of the callous young men who might just use her for their own ends. The rest of the cast (including Tom Rhys Harris, (Aussie) Daniel Monks and Indira Varma) are all excellent in their way. It is an ensemble piece and the whole is a great meld of several parts.

The NT Live series (in which productions from the National Theatre in London are screened around the world ) has become a calendar highlight for fans of theatre. Filming a play might not be as good as seeing it on the stage, but with productions like this, we are just grateful for the chance to see it at all.

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