‘High Art? High arse more like!” That’s how the more self-regarding aspects of the theatrical profession are described in a new version of Chekhov’s The Seagull commissioned by Headlong and the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton. “It’s lovely to spit that line out with as much vitriol as possible,” actor Alexander Cobb tells me — he delivers those cutting words in the production, which tours to the Oxford Playhouse next week. “I bumped into Henny Finch, Headlong’s producer, in the beer garden of a South London pub one night,” explains writer John Donnelly.

“She let slip that they were looking for someone to adapt The Seagull, and pretty much there and then I tried to convince her to let me do it. “It’s my favourite play for a number of reasons, not least because I worked as a glorified tea boy on a version at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1999 with Ian McKellen as the Doctor. I kind of fell in love with it then.

“Next I had a meeting with the director, Blanche McIntyre, and persuaded her to let me have a go. “Because I wanted it so much, and had to be a little pushy to get the job, I didn’t have time to be troubled by the play’s ‘revered’ status. I had to get on with it. The overwhelming desire to have a go far outweighed any vanity-based anxiety about looking a berk.”

John has used thoroughly modern language to bring out both the tensions between the different generations — the slanging match between playwright Konstantin and “mature” actress Irina is quite something — and to highlight the characters’ elusive search for happiness. As director Blanche puts it: “John and I agreed it was terribly important the characters speak as people speak today, because Chekhov’s original dialogue reflects how they spoke then. “The relationships between the characters are vital, how they see each other, and the sense they make of the world. So what we needed to do was to stage the play in a way that clears as much of the accumulated clutter away as possible, in order to bring these points out more strongly.”

The first performance of The Seagull was famously a disaster, put on with only nine days’ rehearsal — surely a suicidally short time for such a complex play, I suggest to Jenny Rainsford, who plays Masha.

She said: “We had four weeks’ rehearsal, normally more than enough for me. I had 11 days to rehearse the last play I was in, and that was fine. But you could dig into The Seagull for a decade, and still be finding stuff.”

For Blanche, The Seagull is the latest production in a burgeoning career, which got under way in a rather unusual fashion: it’s not every Oxford classics graduate who then moves down Beaumont Street to become assistant director on Aladdin at the Playhouse.

“I started directing at school when I was 15, so in fact that came before classics,” Blanche laughs. “I worked in squash courts and tiny sheds. When I finished uni I thought: ‘I’ll give professional theatre a go. If I can’t make a success of it in five years, I’ll get a proper job with a pension’.”

So no surprise, I suggest, that Irina in The Seagull comes out with the line: “I haven’t got any money, darling, I’m an actress”.

“We talked about this in rehearsal. We worked out that she must have become a single mum at about 17, and if the only way you can get money to bring up your child is by working as an actress, there must have been times when she had nothing at all. As Abigail Cruttenden [who plays Irina] said: ‘You always think every job is going to be your last!”

 

The Seagull
 

  • Oxford Playhouse
  • May 21–25
     
  • Tickets: 01865 305305 or oxfordplayhouse.com