She clings to her fickle lover, Trigorin, as if to the image of her own fading beauty—just as she bandages Konstantin’s self-inflicted head wound in the manner of someone showing us how much she cares. (“Forgive your wicked mother!” she says to him. “Friends again?”)
Exactly when Arkadina’s acting begins and ends is part of her seductive game (and our fascination). When it’s said of Chekhov’s plays that nobody hears what anyone else says, she’s a perfect example. She thrives in her own dangerous vortex. “Think kindly of us!” she cries out rhetorically at one surprising point. Yet she can also confess with facile hauteur that she’s never read a word her son’s ever written. She’s essentially heartless, and Ms. Scott Thomas’s singular achievement is to risk not being loved by playing the coldness at Arkadina’s actressy center.
Peter Sarsgaard’s bearded, slightly fey, doughy Trigorin wrong-footed me at first. I was prepared for a more traditionally dashing interpretation. Yet how brilliantly Mr. Sarsgaard insinuates the passive, spiritually dead spinelessness of the man. This is a writer who possesses enough self-awareness to know that he’s had the luck of a second-rater. Trigorin is a shallow middlebrow success made by a shallow middlebrow public. He’s the author of his own ironic, sullen epitaph:
“Here lies Trigorin. He was good—but not as good as Turgenev. …”
Carey Mulligan’s performance as Nina is kissed by greatness. Her Nina is so giddily intoxicated by theater and fame that she would have eagerly become another Arkadina—had she not ruined her young life first. In the brilliantly, modestly staged opening play-within-a-play, Ms. Mulligan’s performance of Konstantin’s overheated, experimental prose-play is utterly, touchingly sincere; and her reunion with Konstantin in which she declares her undying love for Trigorin breaks all hearts.
Nina is the only character who comes to understand herself. She’s found her way, as Konstantin tells her when they part, though it’s a hard way of tragic endurance and faith. As for the Hamlet-like Konstantin, he dies three times over—for love of Nina, who never returns his love; for love of his mother, who kills him with indifference; and for love of theater, which rejects him.
His passionate speech opposing the status quo represented by the dreary “one-size-fits-all” traditional theater of his mother is both an Oedipal rebellion and a manifesto for urgent change that rings true today.
“You couldn’t do without the theater,” his uncle Sorin suggests amiably.
“New forms. We need new forms,” the idealistic Konstantin replies emphatically, “and if there’s none to be had, we’d be better off with nothing at all.”
In typical Chekhovian fashion, Konstantin is someone who tries to commit suicide twice—the first time as farce, the second as tragedy. Mackenzie Crook—hitherto known to me only as the ridiculously ambitious Gareth, the assistant to the manager, in the BBC version of The Office—is a revelation in the role. The Byronic Mr. Crook, resisting the temptation to play his damaged Konstantin as a hysterical neurotic on the verge of a nervous breakdown, makes his contemptuous fury and resentment all the more powerful for seeming insistently rational behind blazing, hurt eyes.
Konstantin is a writer who glimpses the destination, but can’t find the way. His epiphany comes too late to save him: It isn’t about old and new forms, “but writing freely from the heart.”
That’s Chekhov’s enduring gift to us, now fulfilled by this great production.
jheilpern@observer.com
