Did "The Seagull" Fly?

Anton Chekhov decided to write a play about writing. Anyone that’s ever tried to write anything knows the frustrations and fulfilments of putting words on a page. Starring – amongst others – Kristin Scott Thomas Gosford Park, Keeping Mum), Mackenzie Crook (The Office, Pirates of the Caribbean) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Kinky Boots, Four Brothers), it certainly has a mixture of different types of actors. But does it add to the pleasure or take away from it?

WHAT DID THE CRITICS THINK?

“What a blaze of desperate intensity he brings to his hopeless wooing of Mulligan’s ardent, vulnerable Nina. Eyes fixed in a distant stare, shimmering with passion, the desolate, bearded Konstantin promises early on to kill himself and the threat for once sounds like an assured prophecy. I have never seen the last Nina-Konstantin encounter better done. Mulligan piles on the pathos as an eerily mature, sexually obsessed Nina.”
- Evening Standard -

“In a role that’s a far cry from the ghastly Gareth in The Office, Mackenzie Crook gives a touchingly truthful performance as Konstantin – his lanky body and injured eyes conveying the love-starved neediness of a youth who is mortified to lose both his neglectful mother and his starry-eyed girlfriend to an older, experienced and successful writer, Trigorin.”
- Independent –

“This is a drama which touches on the perils of celebrity – through its famous author, his successful actress lover, a struggling young playwright and a doomed young actress – and yet, as in any good Chekhov production, the celebrities don’t run away with the show: the focus of attention constantly shifts from character to character; Chekhov is the most democratic of playwrights.”
- Guardian -

“The acting is, without exception, outstanding. Kristin Scott Thomas makes a quite ghastly Arkadina, which I mean as the highest compliment: a monster mother, the surface all icy, smiling egomania and brittle self-regard, but with desperation and sorrow coursing just beneath the porcelain skin. That harrowing, mutually manipulative-destructive scene between mother and son, when she begins by tending his head wound and ends by screaming “Parasite!” and, “ Mediocrity!” at him, reaches heights of intensity painful to watch.”
- Times –

“Carey Mulligan’s Nina, a wannabe actress dazzled by the glamour of the theatre and the notoriety of Arkadina’s writer boyfriend Trigorin, comes across as naive as any Pop Idol contestant. Her description of playing the winter season in Yelets is a sage reminder of the realities of artistic drudgery. But she also delivers the play’s most fortifying message, following her convincing conversion from innocent to broken woman – that it’s the ability to endure that counts in art as in life.”
- The Stage -