Review: Gender and Performance Under the Spotlight in ACTRESSES: AN ADAPTATION OF CHEKHOV'S 'THE SEAGULL' at #NAF2016

ACTRESSES: AN ADAPTATION OF CHEKHOV'S "THE SEAGULL" is the kind of production that captures one's attention. The poster is excellent, with an image that is as provocative as production company Black Hole Collective's description of their work. Anton Chekhov's 1895 drama was first produced the following year and became a landmark play in Konstantin Stanislavsky's 1898 staging for the Moscow Art Theatre. Presented as a bold reinterpretation of Chekhov's original, ACTRESSES joins the ranks of many adaptations of the 121-year-old play, including an opera in 1974 by Thomas Pasatieri and Kenward Elmslie, a ballet in 2002 by John Neumeier, a deconstructed 2013 version by Aaron Posner called STUPID f-ing BIRD and even a recent South African translation by Saartjie Botha.

ACTRESSES retells the familiar central plot of THE SEAGULL, focusing on the characters of Irina, a famous actress who is thought to be past her prime by her son, Konstantin, who is obsessed with Nina, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner who herself aspires to be an actress. These three characters frequently refer to a fourth, Trigorin, a popular writer who is Irina's lover and the cause of envy in Konstantin. Trigorin is occasionally represented on stage by a red spotlight. Beginning with Konstantin preparing for the performance of his symbolist drama, ACTRESSES presents many of THE SEAGULL's key moments as the relationships between the four figures shift. The presentation of the dead seagull to Nina, Konstantin's attempted suicide, the always brilliant scene between Irina and Konstantin as she changes the bandage on his head and Nina's famous seagull/actress monologue are all present.

The adaptation of the text of THE SEAGULL to create ACTRESSES is skilled, an exemplary reduction that could work well as the basis for an engaging deconstruction of the classic play to serve contemporary themes. But although the piece has been exceptionally reworked on the page, ACTRESSES plays it safe on the stage. Marketing itself as unpredictable, intimate and ruthless in the way it explores its subject matter, ACTRESSES achieves only the second of those three objectives.

Attaining an atmosphere of intimacy is no mean feat given the sheer size of Glennie Hall, where the production is running. Thanks to a purposefully small playing size and the characters' personal moments with random audience members early on in the performance, ACTRESSES manages to contrive a sense of intimacy in spite of the challenges of the space. These latter interactions offer, perhaps, the only unpredictable moments in the production, but the concept itself is not an unexpected one. Mostly, the narrative plays out as a fairly straightforward reading of the source material, despite the shifts in the relationship between gender and role, which incorporate elements of drag and camp. The production's dealings with the themes of performance and gender are more playful than ruthless; in fact, they are even rudimentary for a production dealing with these topics. ACTRESSES never teases out the complexity of its ideas beyond a mere statement of fact.

Directed by Rachel Shull, who also performs in the production, the lack of an authoritative outside eye in ACTRESSES is felt. Shull's staging gets the piece from top to bottom and even plays with some interesting ideas, such as the balloon that Konstantin hugs until it bursts. With an eye focused entirely on directing the piece, ACTRESSES might find its footing in challenging the creative constraints faced by Chekhov that the Black Hole Collective attempts to address through their production. As Konstantin, Shull takes the character to an intensely vulnerable place a little too early; she needs to work out more specifically his emotional transitions from moment to moment. Nonetheless, there Shull's performance resonates with emotional connection.

Mathew Bazulka, as Irina, really comes into his own when he breaks out into song. It is in these moments that a sense of real subversion finds its way into this production. With his speech being less robust than his singing, his vocal work needs greater muscularity. A rather one-dimensional Nina, Daniel Meltz needs to explore the shifting parameters of the character, which are otherwise communicated only through costume.

Although it aims to and should disrupt the accepted norms of gender performance and how society perceives gender performance, ACTRESSES end up preserving a particularly frustrating worldview that cross-dressing is all right as long it stays in the theatre. Just two nights ago at the very festival where ACTRESSES is playing, a person was attacked in a popular convenience store for being in drag. This attack was not the first of its kind during this year's the National Arts Festival, and this sort of behaviour is certainly not restricted to small-town South Africa. While not every piece of theatre has to be socially and politically directed, and even though ACTRESSES is by no means the only representation of the compromise in the dialogue between society and the arts, when a production takes certain issues on board in the contemporary socio-political environment with an apparent seriousness of intent, there is an intrinsic responsibility in how those issues are handled. ACTRESSES could do so much more to thread its thesis through its production.

ACTRESSES: AN ADAPTATION OF CHEKHOV'S "THE SEAGULL" opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on 4 July. There are two performances left, on 9 July at 17:00 and 10 July at 12:00. Bookings are through the National Arts Festival website.

To post a comment, you must register and login.