‘The best kind of staging’: ‘Mesmerizing’ production of Anton Chekhov’s play ‘The Seagull’ at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre

The Seagull

By Anton Chekhov, in a new version by Simon Stephens, directed by Daniel Brooks. Until April 30 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 30 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666

At long last, Daniel Brooks’ production of Chekhov’s great play about theatre, love and heartbreak is onstage. Already well into rehearsal in March 2020 when everything shut down, Soulpepper Theatre recorded the production as an audio play during the pandemic and held fast to its commitment to a full-blown staging.

It puts on display Brooks’s great talent in enabling actors to inhabit characters, relationships and environments so that what comes across to the audience is a fully realized, emotionally engulfing world, one that — in this instance — insists it’s a world we are part of, too.

Anchored by a mesmerizing performance by Paolo Santalucia as the tortured young writer Konstantin, the 11-person ensemble gives unpredictable, original, deeply felt performances. Together they create a convincing portrait of an indelibly messed-up extended family and its hangers-on at the country home of Peter Sorin (Oliver Dennis).

Soulpepper and Brooks have chosen well with Simon Stephens’ irreverent 2017 translation, which has the characters talking like real people today and doesn’t set the action in any particular place, but does include moments in which characters directly address the audience.

Not including Russian names and references limits direct associations with the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, but reminders that a fiction is being enacted does allow for that conflict to be present as context for those who bring those associations to their viewing (it has been argued that it’s impossible to fully mute such connections).

What this production nails perfectly is the characters’ painful, often funny combination of acute self-awareness and incapacity to stop longing for things and people that are never going to be theirs.

Nobody’s comfortably partnered here: Konstantin loves aspiring actress Nina (Hailey Gillis), but she falls for the charismatic and self-absorbed writer Boris (Raoul Bhaneja), who is in a convenient but uneven relationship with Irina (Michelle Monteith), a famous actress and Konstantin’s mother. Masha (Ellie Ellwand), daughter of the couple who run Peter’s estate, is as obsessed with Konstantin as the local teacher Simeon (Farhang Ghajar) is with her.

Masha’s mother, Paulina (Robyn Stevan), is in an ongoing dalliance with the doctor Hugo (Diego Matamoros) and the depth of her desperate passion for him becomes clear in an astonishing moment in which she tears a bouquet to bits and hurls it away.

This extends a trope in the show of things getting thrown at the back wall, which is represented in Shannon Lea Doyle’s metaphorically resonant set by a translucent plastic tarp. There’s always something lurking behind these people’s experiences — a memory, a thwarted desire — and nothing is as solid as it seems.

The clarity the entire cast bring to their roles is exemplary even in the smaller parts, from Dan Mousseau’s droll, perpetually stoned handyman Jacob, to Ellwand’s wry self-absorption as Masha, to Ghajar’s remarkable lack of self-pity as the steadfast Simeon, to estate manager Leo’s (Randy Hughson) wrongful certainty that his stories of the old days are as fascinating to others as they are to him.

Dennis and Matamoros bring nuance to their roles as the benign patriarch who ages before our eyes and the doctor who finds some agency to remove himself from this stifling environment, respectively.

Following Chekhov, Stephens has composed whopper-long monologues for certain characters, and the actors make their way through them with presence and precision: Bhaneja’s Act II aria that’s ostensibly about his attraction to Nina but is really about his own writing; and Gillis’s heartbreakingly anguished rendering of Nina’s final speech that reveals the extent to which her ill-fated life has destroyed her mental health.

Monteith looks appropriately glamorous in Snezana Pesic’s thoughtful costumes, which always have Irina in signature shades of red. It’s a performance that fights against casting, however: Monteith is too young for the part and has a physical and vocal lightness that don’t match the character’s larger-than-life, diva qualities. That said, she gives a deeply committed performance, and she and Santalucia navigate their way beautifully through a mother-and-son scene that has them tearing verbal strips off each other one minute and clutching each other sobbing the next.

It is Santalucia’s Konstantin who is the show’s riveting through-line from the minute he comes onstage looking like a Beckett clown in a baggy mismatched suit and weird black mop of hair. Even if he and Gillis are a bit too old for their roles, they are nonetheless convincing as wilfully idealistic youth whose passion for each other is tied up with a ravenous need for professional expression and fulfilment (Stephens’ version draws out this theme of toxic ambition, something that drives Irina and Boris as well).

Nina’s passions get diverted onto Boris but, for Konstantin, it’s always Nina and the extent to which not having her hollows him that is harrowing to witness.

The production is three hours long including an intermission, but I didn’t feel the length. Brooks’ direction (with associate director Frank Cox-O’Connell) has scenes flowing quickly and naturally into each other and sweeping the audience away with them. This is the best kind of staging of a classic that feels as if it’s been written and experienced for the first time.