THEATRE:Adam Haupt
STELLENBOSCH’S HB Thom Theatre seems like the very last place you would expect to find the Russian Consulate’s Sasha Mukhin. In fact, he was the guest of honour at the opening night of Anton Chekhov’s Die Seemeeu (The Seagull) and took on a performance of his own by addressing his audience in Russian.
I was struck by the irony of having Mukhin speak at a theatre complex named after someone who once rubbed shoulders with BJ Vorster and led the University of Stellenbosch during apartheid’s wonder years.
Mukhin’s largely reconciliatory speech picked up on some of these ironies in a light-hearted manner when he said things such as: “There was no cold war between the Soviet Union and South Africa, but a misunderstanding.”
Politics or semantics aside, the cast itself seems quite at home in Chekov’s rather difficult tragi-comedy. The first three acts work well despite the difficulty faced by the essentially young cast in convincingly conveying some of the subtle nuances in Andre Brink’s translation.
For example, the potential sexual attraction between Konstantin Treplev (Nico Dreyer) and Jewgeni Dorn (Gaerin Hauptfleisch) is somewhat underplayed and the ambiguities are glossed over. Nico Dreyer is nonetheless well cast as the angst-ridden and angry Konstantin, while Nicole Holm’s over-the-top portrayal of Irina Arkadina presents the perfect antithesis to Dreyer’s broody character.
But the play’s particular draw-card is Masja, played by Amelda Brand, whose body language adds greatly to the play’s humour. One can almost hear Soundgarden’s dreary The Day I Tried to Live as she drags herself pathetically across the stage after Konstantin, who wants to have nothing to do with her.
This is where Jaco Bouwer’s character, Semjon Medwedenko, comes in. Bouwer plays the poverty-stricken teacher who walks six kilometres each day to see Masja.
Mostly, he trails her like a benevolent labrador, and their interaction sustains the humour throughout the play’s increasingly dark and broody narrative.
Leanna Dreyer’s portrayal of Nina Zaretsjnaja supports the impression that Shirley Johnston’s direction makes optimum use of these students’ ability to move performatively.
The varying manner in which Holm moves in each act visualises the development of the play’s central metaphor, the seagull, in innovative ways despite the realist framework which the elaborate set provides.
By the fourth act, however, the cast seem to lose impetus and let their performance slide a bit. This is where the difficulty of performing this particular play emerges, because the narrative does actually take a tragic twist.
The question is how one maintains a certain level of performance when the narrative loses all of its comic elements and merely becomes tragic in very understated terms when, hitherto, all the action has been lively in spite of its subtlety.
As with many of Chekhov’s plays, most significant events occur off stage in Die Seemeeu. The final act’s success therefore depends on maintaining enough tension on stage in order to signify the importance of the gunshot off stage.
For some reason this tension is not sustained in this performance and the conclusion appears to be somewhat rushed.
Die Seemeeu was on at the HB Thom Theatre, Drama Department (University of Stellenbosch) on November 25, 26 and 27. No further performances are planned for the time being