The Seagull - The Royal Lyceum ★★★★

Chekhov’s timeless comedy of yearning, The Seagull, adapted here by Mike Poulton, is revived at Edinburgh’s Lyceum in a cast headed by Caroline Quentin as the indomitable Irina Arkadina. With Quentin at the helm, this Seagull draws more than enough laughs to dispel the idea of it being a “heavy” Russian drama.

Arkadina is an actress immovably absorbed by a career marked by great successes and failures but nothing, she proclaims, that was ever mediocre. At her lakeside country estate, surrounded by family and servants and with her lover, the successful but unprincipled writer Trigorin, she is determined to remain centre stage.

Her son Konstantin (Lorn Macdonald), an earnest and aspiring playwright who longs for her attention, declares that his mother acts everything, including motherhood, and Quentin uses all her instincts for physical and vocal comedy to underscore the truth of his observation. To her ageing brother Sorin (John Bett, crumpling up with illness but still carrying the authority of a former lawyer), Quentin reveals Arkadina’s capacity for affection, but there’s a hardness about her attitude to others. Tightly encased in a heavy dress, worn like armour, and with the stiff hairdo of a no-nonsense matriarch, this is not a performance that emphasises Arkadina’s vulnerabilities. Rather, it flaunts her self-delusion, casual cruelties, and a determination to keep Trigorin trapped by her side. She is, it has to be said, an older woman behaving badly.

From the other side of the lake, Nina joins the gathering, a young rival for Trigorin’s love. Harmony Rose-Bremner brings an enormously attractive vitality and sense of wonder to the role. Both she and Tallulah Greive, as lovelorn Masha, employ a relaxed, less declamatory delivery of Poulton’s text, which emphasises the age difference between the generations and underlines the play’s debates about the old giving way to the new, in life as in the arts.

What we all lose over time is mirrored in the losses of Chekhov’s characters, no matter their age. In Konstantin’s study, late on in the play, we are allowed a moment of stillness to observe the sorrow felt by each individual present – for out-of-reach success and unfilled ambitions. And not least, the failure felt by the put-upon schoolteacher Medvendenko, played with moving reserve by Michael Dylan, who Masha has married, not to find love but to escape from it.

Each of the secret loves is subtly and eloquently revealed, and as Nina awakens to the possibilities of ambition and broadening horizons, it is clear why she is adored by Konstantin and feared by the older Arkadina. However, it also makes her later, shocking trajectory into near-madness less convincing.

This is one of several moments in the production where a character’s sharp change in tone feels unexplained, perhaps because of trimmings made to Chekhov’s original text. Dyfan Dwyfor’s “shy”, virtually silent, Trigorin of the opening scene is surprisingly superior and charmless with Nina in the next. It’s hard to see why Nina falls for him. Dr Dorn and Sorin reveal a sudden, unexplained antagonism for each other – indeed, Forbes Masson as the doctor exhibits bursts of anger throughout that seem in excess of any professional frustrations or his own unrequited love.

This is as strong a cast as you could wish for, each with an assured eye on the comedy of their character’s situations. But they often appear quite different stylistically. While this reflects the differences in attitudes and backgrounds across the generations, it can be discomforting. The desire of director James Brining to show tragedy cheek by jowl with farce (the unassuming role of Polina is given moments of very funny visual comedy by Irene Allan) means that the production as a whole is not always a satisfying sum of its parts. Quentin’s tendency, in particular, to add in physical jokes occasionally sets her too far apart from the more nuanced relationships around her.

The mood is best unified, especially in Act 1, by the soft moonlit tones created by lighting designer Lizzie Powell, and the play’s human change of seasons is beautifully illustrated in a set that allows the rye harvest to enfold the grand domestic settings. (Though the presence of a huge table in the second half appeared to offer little more than an unwieldy prop to move out of the way when its time was up, requiring a song to cover the hiatus.)

In a play with little on-stage action, driven by private and intimate conversations, this production will settle to its task as its company leans further into their relationships. For the moment, while less nuanced than some, The Lyceum’s The Seagull is filled with the humour of human foibles and with people as familiar to us today as when Chekhov penned them over a hundred years ago.