Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL and Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE END (of the seagull, yes, but also of all humankind and our world…)
[Warning: this is a very long and rambling post and possibly more akin to a first year college essay, entirely lacking in focus or discipline. I didn’t have time to write a shorter piece - sozzles - so let me begin with THE END and say both it and THE SEAGULL are brilliant, the former released in cinemas this weekend and the latter now at the Barbican. Go if you possibly can.]
No theatre or film viewing is objective and none should pretend to be. As audience members we bring entire lifetimes of experience and influence to the theatric and cinematic pot-luck tables, not to mention our own personal traits, good or bad, nature(d) or nurture(d), and so it should come as no surprise that we take away something equally individual and unique, never to be repeated. A show or film we adore on the singular occasion on which we see it may have been disliked if we’d seen it on another occasion, entirely loathed on another, life affirming on another, and everything in between. For my part, I am entirely suggestible and easily swayed, and I exercise woefully little self-control or self-censorship over opinions for which I take absolutely no responsibility (case in point: perhaps I could have liked DISCLAIMER under different circumstances, e.g. if I’d been stranded on a desert island with a serious head injury, losing all sense of discernment and taste, with only those six hours of telly to sustain me…. Maybe… 🙄).
No man is an island and nor, I would argue, is any film or play: archipelagos, moreso. Take, for example, my odd pairing over recent days of two extraordinary and seemingly singular productions, Thomas Ostermeier’s THE SEAGULL and Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE END, two cultural adventures that appear, on the face of it, to have little in common (other than the greedy vowel-consumption evidenced in both these directors’ names: say them aloud a few times for an excellent new tongue twister!), but which have since become entirely entangled in my fragile, Lion’s Mane-addled brain (I have started having a couple of gummies a day and I am all over the place and it’s marvellous… try some!). Forevermore will I associate Chekhov with the post-Apocalyptic, climate disaster nightmares which are our current, essential preoccupation and, equally, forevermore will I associate the bunker in THE END with the Russian countryside and the ornicidal shenanigans of Konstantin and co. Two have become one (as Scary Spice might warble…).
I managed to finagle a last minute ticket to see #shero Cate Blanchett on stage at the Barbican, giving her an opportunity to redeem herself after a so-so performance in BLACK BAG (albeit not the kind your throw out for the rubbish collection…) and a diabolical one in DISCLAIMER (“What did you put in my fucking tea?!” is now an oft-said line in my house, some small trinket salvaged from Alfonso Cuaron’s show… and yes, I am still on that in a PTSD-type way). I have a connection to the Barbican insofar as my grandmother, Big Olive (she was six feet tall and therefore the answer to the question, “What do you put in a fifteen foot Martini?”), was baptised in St Giles Cripplegate Church in 1922, a time when the site was not residential (it was warehouses, mostly) and she was the only baptism for several decades, a privilege afforded to her father as he was the local Fire Chief (or fireman… I might have posthumously promoted him…). Having been razed and rebuilt by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in the 1960s (with the exception of St Giles, left standing smack bang in the middle), the exterior of the brutalist behemoth that is the Barbican Estate is somewhat at odds with the highfalutin content it offers in its excellent theatre, film and exhibition spaces. There is a decadent dissonance in the experience of walking from the tube station along the grim, dusty and very dated Beech Street Tunnel while clutching expensive tickets for the season’s “must see” show and noting signage for Shakespeare’s Tower and Defoe’s House, and I rather like it (although, as I like to say to my children, I’d prefer to visit Defriend’s House…): that filthy walk through lethal levels of carbon monoxide and an imminent phone-mugging to get to a theatre that has already sold you a £200 ticket and intends to sell you an £18 glass of wine (a further mugging under the guise of irresistible “culture”) is… brilliant. It’s what living in London is all about, right? And it’s also why the Barbican is the perfect venue for Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, a play set in the rural countryside, yes, but which is mostly filled with people who do not belong there, not at all: city folk (of which I am one, savouring the hustle and bustle and anonymity of city dwelling and seldom venturing to the post-apocalyptic British territories outside the M25…).
Fading stage star Irina Arkafina (Cate Blanchett) and her new toy-boy, much-lauded writer Trigorin (an always excellent Tom Burke who, not coincidentally at all, I’m guessing, was in BLACK BAG with Cate, but was more Hermes crocodile skin tote than bin bag, by far the best thing in it) are at her country estate with her brother Piotr and son, Konstantin, an aspiring writer and theatre-maker himself. Enter ingenue Nina and a gun in the first Act (which, we have been assured by the rule book of Chekhov himself, must go off by the fourth) and we have all the elements required for a… comedy. Well, Chekhov said it was a comedy and perhaps it is (in much the same way as the Hollywood Foreign Press says THE BEAR is a comedy), albeit one with heartbreak and suicide and the death of an infant and the ensuing madness of its mother. Classically speaking, it’s a comedy, I guess: the ‘natural’ order of things is restored and Irina is returned to centre stage with Trigorin on her arm, exactly where they, the stars, are meant to be.
THE SEAGULL is regularly cited as a great play about writing, but I think of it as a great play about performance, in the theatre and otherwise, very much along the “all the world’s a stage” lines and engaging with what a contemporary audience might call “authenticity”, a word which sticks in my craw but means something important, I think. Chekhov asks many of the key questions we perpetually ask of ourselves: Who am I? What is my nature? What/who/which is my authentic self? When am I being ‘myself’ and when am I performing? Does my ‘self’ emerge from within (nature), or is it constructed from without (nurture)?
With the exception of those dastardly scientists who separated the triplets in THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS to ascertain the impact of growing up in different circumstances (I mean… wtf? Who’d do such a thing? And if you do it, at least don’t put all three in New Jersey, ffs), we know it is futile to expect a clear answer in the nurture vs nature debate. We are built of a complex combination of both, each of us unique in the balance we strike between our inherited gifts and failings and the experiences of our existence on this god forsaken planet. Trying to better understand ourselves with a view to self-improvement or “progress” is a modern day pastime and a costly one, consuming many of our hours and more of our dollars and pounds, and it is, imo, a pastime that can catalyse change in and of itself, confusingly. i.e. therapy/self-scrutiny is a form of nurture, so a far from perfect and rather biased tool for digging into the nature vs nurture question. While Socrates may have been right that the unexamined life is not worth living, I think it is also true to say examining one’s life is a nurturing activity that risks taking you further and further away from your nature. If, as I sometimes think, true happiness is reached when we bring our natural self (our raw, unpolished and authentic self) as close as possible to our nurture(d) self (the persona constructed from our experiences and performed to the world), then we have to be careful not to over-nurture the delicate blossom that is our nature. The effort we put into the nature vs nurture tug-o’-war could and should, imo, be more of a conciliatory process, a personal and non-adversarial truth forum of sorts.
Anywho, I digress (as is my nature…) and am really just trying to say that Ostermeier’s production of THE SEAGULL is about performance, imo. Irina performs for the crowd, absorbing their adulation and reflecting it back to them (nurture), while Konstantin wants to speak from the heart, sharing a little bit of himself with whomever is prepared to listen (nature), simply seeking some recognition of his artistry and a witness to his existence. Trigorin sits between the two, unable to reconcile the day to day torturous experience of living as a writer from the glamorous life perceived (erroneously) by those on the outside. “You can have my life,” he says to Nina, who craves red carpets and standing ovations and does not yet understand what it might cost her, “I am not living it.” In the very centre of the discussion of nature and nurture, our authentic self vs the self we perform, is the question of truth, that old chestnut and a riddle never-to-be solved, not by Richard Gadd, nor by Alfonso Cuaron, nor by Chekhov.
Nor, for that matter, by Brecht. Ostermeir utilises a number of Brechtian devices in an endeavour to solve the riddle, breaking the fourth wall and reminding us of the artifice of the theatre, of our jobs as the audience to excavate the slippery fish that is the ’truth’ from the layers of costume, make-up, writing and performances under which it is buried. Actors come out of character (kinda… if they are ever in character at all…) and break the fourth wall, including Tom Burke asking the audience, “With all of the horror we see in the real world today, what is the point of being here, in the theatre? What are we doing here?” And receiving the answer from high up in the Barbican’s nosebleeders, “Waiting for the intermission!” Right there is an audience member who knows their line and delivers it with aplomb: genius. 🙌 And the fourth wall is regularly broken by Zachary Hart as ‘average guy on the Russian country lane’-type Simon Medvedenko, he who is probably closest to fully unearthing his authentic self and, in this production, singer of Billy Bragg’s folk songs about social activism and political change and… how to live an authentic life, I’d venture. These songs are sung out of character (kinda…) and the actor speaks directly to us in unscripted dialogue including specific references to this day, this performance, this specific audience, and we are asked why we are there. Do not, says Ostermeir, suspend your disbelief: look around and remind yourself you are in a theatre, in London, while wars are fought and fires rage and humanity is at risk, and you are turning to what to find your salvation? Art? Performance? Well, yes. Where else are we to look?
Cate Blanchett’s performance as Irina Arkadina is very annoying, if I’m honest, but intentionally so. She plays an ageing actress who is always on stage, even when she is at the lakeside in the country without an audience other than the family for whom she should not have to constantly perform. Can’t she just be… herself? I ran into a friend at the Barbican and he made an observation of actresses reaching the “Grande Dame” phase where they start to only play versions of themselves, and I suppose Cate B is playing a version of herself, knowingly so, in a very ‘meta’ performance of a performer perpetually performing (and I mean ‘meta’ in a non-Facebook way, although was there ever a better stage for performing a constructed version of oneself?!). Tom Burke is witty and vulnerable and somehow manages to be sympathetic as the self-regarding man who makes the SHOCKING decision to leave his older partner for a much younger model (yawn!) and Emma Corrin is quite mesmerising, I think, as Nina, said younger model (although she is so slight as to be almost absent from the stage, an eerie and unearthly presence much like her IRL bf Rami Malek in OEDIPUS at the Old Vic, and they live near me and I’m thinking about breaking into their house and filling their fridge with calorific treats, just to ensure we get a bit more of them, quite literally…).
[And, speaking of younger models and also the “grass is greener” thing that plagues every introvert who wants to be an extrovert etc etc, I have been regularly dipping into a tragic show called YOUNGER on Prime Video, for my sins: a 40 year old woman pretends to be 26 years old in order to get a much sought-after job in the youth-enamoured world of publishing… FFS. I mean, split the difference and say you’re 32, lady (played by Hugh Jackwoman, Sutton Foster): young people think everyone over thirty is old and we all look the same to them. Equally, if you are going to lie on your CV to get a job in 2015, is this the lie to make? Why not just say you worked for an obscure poet in Equador and have written a series of erotica under a pseudonym, making it a lie you don’t have to perform in crop tops and glittery eye-shadow every fucking day?! Surely this lie is akin to calling work to say you’ll miss a day due to breaking both legs in a car accident, when you could just say you have a migraine?! Anywho, it aired from 2015 and is therefore a period piece, entirely pre-woke, pre-#MeToo and spouting feminism more fitting to the Victorians than whatever Gen- we now find ourselves drowning in, and I can’t get enough of it. And there is some relevance insofar as (i) the performance element is exactly the same as in THE SEAGULL and raises Chekhovian questions of who we are and how we choose to ‘play’ ourselves on the world’s stage, even if these Chekhovian elements are dressed up as Cindi Lauper, (ii) the ‘grass is greener’ uniquely human frustration is in evidence across YOUNGER, THE SEAGULL and THE END (and is perhaps part of our species’ condition, maybe?); and (iii) the entire drive of the show is a “will they, won’t they” narrative between Hugh Jackwoman and her boss, who believes himself to be 30 years or so older than her, and his tortured desire for a forbidden, Nina-esque talented younger woman who admires his big, manly.. brain (and, incidentally, he look exactly like Hugh Jackman!) Avoid it if you are currently monitoring your cultural intake: it is the content equivalent of popcorn insofar as it is not in any way nutritious or sustaining, but it is very, very moreish.]
The cast of THE SEAGULL is, all in all, excellent, great “performances”, and the same must be said of the equally starry cast of Joshua Oppenheimer’s brain-busting fiction feature debut (after his genre-shifting and unbelievably empathetic documentary portraits of perpetrators of the Indonesian massacres in the 1960s in THE ACT OF KILLING and THE LOOK OF SILENCE… what films!), THE END, including Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and George Mackay as Mother, Father, Son, names with perfectly adequate specificity given they are the only remaining mother, father and son on the planet further to climate disaster and the annihilation of the human race. Sucks, eh? If only we had seen it coming…. Well, Oppenheimer reminded me/us in a post-screening Q and A (hosted wonderfully by Lily Cole) that the etymology of “apocalypse” is the Greek word for “revelation”, and so there is an argument we are already in a post-apocalyptic, post-revelation time as we all know how it’s gonna end for the human race and our fragile planet: climate disaster.
The idea of existing in a post-apocalyptic space individually, as a family, as a species and as a planet has occupied my tiny brain since seeing THE END: when, I have been asking myself, did I have the revelation/apocalypse for the end of my own life? I guess it was when I received a terminal cancer diagnosis and I have been post-apocalyptic in a personal capacity since then (which makes a whole lotta sense and is a brilliant excuse for some of my recent mega-failings…). And when was the revelation/apocalypse re the end of my marriage? It was at a significantly earlier date for my ex-husband than for me, certainly, but perhaps I should have more compassion for a man who may well have been struggling through the post-apocalyptic phase of our marriage without me for years and years, much like The Man - who may equally have been called Father - in Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘The Road’. (Fuckin’ hell: that’s a revelation if ever I had one. Might need to lie down and cry for a bit….)
Oppenheimer’s last ‘nuclear family’ is anything but average or ordinary: Father was an energy executive who made his fortune causing the climate disaster that has robbed everybody else of their’s, building a luxury bunker in the likeness of a British stately home, living like aristocracy with a butler and hired help, but not offering sanctuary to anyone other than themselves, including their own parents and the few surviving strangers who have knocked on their gigantic doors in the twenty-some years since they locked themselves away. The story is inspired by the filmmaker’s real life encounter documenting the life of an oligarch who had made billions from the violent destruction of a number of small nations and was doing exactly as Mother, Father and Son do in the film: building a bunker to survive the end of the world. Talk about prioritising the individual over our collective survival, eh? What a load of fuckers we idolise and reward on this planet, eh? Where did we go so wrong?
Like Ostermeier, Oppenheimer (say it five times very, very fast!) uses a Brechtian device to bring his post-apocalyptic vision as close as possible to the here and now, to the reality and the revelation that climate disaster will destroy us: THE END is a musical. These are not Billy Bragg songs, they are much more personal (I guess social and political activism have no real place in a world with a population of six…) and desperate. This Mother, Father and Son have been performing their happy families routine as the world’s only survivors and ‘chosen ones’ for far too long. They have lost the last thread of truth to which they might have clung. Father is a revisionist who seeks to commission of Son a biography extolling his good deeds on this fine earth before it perished at his hands, whitewashing his responsibility for its end by waxing poetic about his relatively meagre do-gooding efforts. No doubt many a library, church roof and wing of an esteemed museum will have been named after the Man or Men who have signed the death warrant for humankind and this world in a quill dipped in blood and oil. And we know it: we have had the revelation and yet we have done nothing about it. Not really.
And so I have permanently woven these wonderful experiences of Ostermeier’s THE SEAGULL and Oppenheimer’s THE END into a single, rich, terrifying and quite beautiful tapestry of thoughts and feelings that is very subjective and in which I am seeking all the answers to life and the meaning of it. I am reluctant to pull on a thread and risk unravelling their combined, enhanced value for the benefit of performative star-ratings that will mean so little given nobody will be able to repeat the same experience, each going into the theatre or the cinema or, if they are very lucky, both, to have their own unique string of never-to-be-repeated moments. That’s the joy of it all, of life and of art, isn’t it? And so I’ll just say congrats to both Thomas Ostermeier and Joshua Oppenheimer, who have excelled equally at storytelling, truth-making and artifice, in my singular opinion (although the vowel score, if I am spelling their names correctly, is 7:8, and so the clear winner is Joshua on that front… 👏).
(Who am I kidding? ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ each, obvs!)
