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Druid Theater Company presents Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy’s 1981 adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 play in haunting Coole Park, near the famous house ruins. Under a gray Galway twilight sky, we sit facing Francis O’Connor’s temporary wooden stage with a smaller temporary wooden stage set up for play in the room. New production from director Garry Hynes The Seagull is probably the most atmospheric I will ever see; also, I guess, the most theatrical.
“What does theater have to do with reality? The question, not in Chekhov but introduced by Kilroy, is posed by celebrating actor Isobel (Chekhov’s Arkadina), played by Eileen Walsh, who almost spits it out as she waits impatiently with a group of family and friends watching his son Constantine (Jack the new experimental play from Gleeson). Isobel rightly expects a counter-explosion from the genre of productions she stars in. “Oh, my God,” she exclaims, as she begins, “one of those Celtic things!”
Kilroy moves the action to an “estate in the west of Ireland at the end of the 19th century”. The resonances of Hynes’ choice of location only bounce off the broken walls around us. Coole Park was once such an area. More than that, it was the home of Lady Gregory who in 1899, along with fellow playwrights Edward Martyn and WB Yeats, first dreamed of founding the Irish Literary Theater just before Konstantin Stanislavsky got his first major success with its new Moscow Art Theater, staging The Seagull. These are not almost in situ, incidental details, for the place is at the heart of Chekhov / Kilroy’s play, in which theater / fiction and reality are inextricably interdependent.
Constantine’s murder of the seagull and his laying at the feet of his beloved actor, Lily, is both a symbolic act and a real, deadly action – the bloody bird shocking to see. A story idea sketched out by Isobel’s lover, novelist Mr Aston, about a girl, a seagull and a destructive seduction becomes the reality of his relationship with Lily. Marty Rea’s Aston balances glamor against insensitive self-interest; like Lily, Agnes O’Casey makes a finely tuned transition from innocence to experience. Isobel and Constantine verbally flay each other, argue over theatrical forms, exploiting their emotional states to explore artistic possibilities. The intense and histrionic performances of Walsh and Gleeson, initially overwhelming, turn into an extraordinary crescendo of tortured mother-son intimacy after Constantine’s suicide attempt; they come to resemble those reflected in shards of a broken mirror.
Hynes’ artistically precise period production, with its shifting frames of reference, is both distinctive and universal; deeply moving and stimulating.
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The Seagull is in Coole Park, County Galway, until August 21, and online on demand as part of the GIAF (Galway International Arts Festival, September 5-12
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