It is the women who dominate this show
By Irving Wardle | July 9 ,1994 | The independent
Besides allowing Dame Judi Dench to add another trophy to her collection of Chekhov leads, John Caird’s production of The Seagull has the pretext of restoring a picture frame to the open stage; or, rather, four picture frames, which descend one by one on John Gunter’s lakeside perspective, so that by the end you are looking through the accumulated settings of the whole play. The apparent aim of this romantically cumbersome design, supported by Dominic Muldowney’s wistful valses oubliees, is to break the embargo on Chekhovian ‘atmosphere’. The effect is contradicted once the opening image of the ghostly company drifting under moonlit birch trees gives way to the play itself, performed with full egoistic drive in a colloquially muscular version by Pam Gems.
The biggest single surprise is Norman Rodway’s Sorin: not a defeated self-mocker, but a man getting in all the hugs, authoritarian tantrums and sardonic monologues he can, and going down – smoker’s cough splendidly intact – still fighting. He presents a total contrast to Edward Petherbridge’s listlessly elegant Dorn; and, indeed, to Alan Cox’s youthfully nondescript Konstantin. Add to them Bill Nighy’s passively bewildered Trigorin and the point emerges that it is the women who dominate this show: Anna Calder-Marshall and Rachel Power, as the frustrated mother and daughter, dancing to Kostya’s playing in the next room; Helen McCrory’s extrovert Nina, who brings the power of a whirlwind to the emotional confusions of the last act. And, of course, Dench. A moody monstre theatrale on arrival, she then blossoms into all the voluptuous complexities of the role, turning even the bandaging of her son’s head into a show-stopping routine and hauling the defecting Trigorin to the floor for an act of masterful, crotch-fixated possession, while smothering him with literary flattery. Hilarious, terrifying, and heart-breaking.