Our adaptation from Chekhov is not written to be played as a period piece but like something happening right now. Chris has deliberately hacked down people’s utterances so they resemble the speech of modern people, who have no time for long debates or reminiscences but just say what they think / want / don’t want in short, snappy soundbites.  Once they get the information they want, they just act on it. When they fly off the handle or fall in love, it’s immediate and tempestuous – no mulling of the pros and cons.

Today we put together the pieces of Part 2 and ran it in full for the first time. This half has scenes of great power and pathos as the rivalries, passions, disappointments and yearnings of all the characters work themselves out one way or another. Great joy to have our Kit back from directing a charity fund-raising production of his own last week; the heart is back in the company now.

We had fun with a piece of running business involving everyone doing a crossword together and making some surprising suggestions for the answers. If the audience join in on the night, who knows where it could go? There were good wheelchair larks and stuffed bird banter too, chucking around of litter, and a new between-the-acts dumb show set to a classic pop song which uncannily mirrors the events of the play.

Because of people’s other commitments our first weeks of work on Seagull have involved a gap of five days between clumps of rehearsals. We should know our lines backwards by now, but boy is it hard to retrieve them from the dark side of the brain after that all that time off.  Actor-led warm-ups did help get the synapses going again, as did the coffee and tea of which fresh supplies miraculously appear in the Soper Hall kitchen every day from an unseen hand – thank you, unseen hand!

Part 1 cracked along.  Life at the Trevannions’ turned out to be packed with incident and drama now that we were doing it all in chronological order, not in snippets as before. Ace note from Chris: the personalities, relationships and situations are all sketched in succinctly with the first appearance of each character. Play our scenes big from the outset and everything will be clear. There is nothing tentative.  Even the characters who dither do it purposefully, and when people make mistakes they do it with all their heart.

The play within a play is going to be something like The Rite of Spring, with instrumental  input and rhythmic chanting from the whole cast, all designed to make the absolute most of the stunning backdrop Nature will provide at the Minack.

(Blog updates by Robert Rowe - playing Peter in The Seagull.)

A peculiarity of classical Russian plays (and novels) is the large numbers of people in them. One thing which swells the cast list is that Russian upper and middle class houses before the Revolution kept an open door to anyone from their milieu who wanted to come in, from casual callers in need of a drink to visiting neighbours after a game of cards to poor relations in need of a roof over their heads. The gentry would give a place at table to anyone of the right class who turned up at dinner time, no questions asked. Once admitted, you were expected to come back as often as you wanted, indeed it was considered rude not to. There was a prince once who gave a complete stranger a place at dinner every night for 20 years without intruding into his business even so far as to ask who he was. And not just princes: the hoi polloi could always get a cup of tea and a bite at the kitchen door.

There’s a little of this about some of the people who throng the houses in Chekhov for no immediately apparent reason. For an actor they’re a joy to play because they’re fairly lightly written and you can fill them out with different approaches to their back story, motivation, likes, dislikes etc. and chop and change as you discover what the other actors and the director contribute. Today we worked on a big scene with six of these characters and found that what made them tick and how they related to each other could be interpreted just as plausibly in two or three different ways. It’s what makes these plays like real life.


Robert Rowe is playing Peter in a new contemporary adaptation of The Seagull, by Chris Chambers.

(Other work done prior to Robert's arrival - some very in depth work on the relationship of Boris and Stella and Stella and Simon. It is becoming clearer and clearer that Chekhov needs to be played with a deep understanding of the meanings behind the words. Subtext works in arcs and themes between characters resonate in countless ways. In life we so often say something, meaning the opposite. In Chekhov's work there are many examples of dialogue that on the surface appears quite superficial. But working daily on this piece, one sees an intricate jigsaw puzzle emerging, with deeply hidden emotions rising and colliding in the most unexpected ways, shielded by the normality of daily life - but ultimately uncontrollable. CC)

A highlight of rehearsal day 5 was seeing a very good actor, with the help of the director, trying out ways of playing the role of someone who, in the play, is a mediocre actor. As the old tag says, the art is to conceal the art, but when what you’re trying to conceal with your acting is the fact that you can act, it is a real feat.

There were dramatic character studies in several scenes. A woman ground to dust by her husband’s tyrannical rigidity finds some temporary comfort when two other people are driven to fury by the same cause. A lazy employer discovers the drawbacks of letting the staff get the upper hand. A woman pleads tearfully with a lover who wants to abandon her for someone younger, even as he takes notes on the situation for his next piece of writing.

It wasn’t just a day for the actors, though. Our producer presented some new sound effects for comments. A dog which barks at night and a lot of the day needs to be more “yappy, less growly”.  A gunshot with a lot of echo sounds surprisingly like a lavatory flushing.  A group of friends overheard singing on the beach are unusually good at close harmony. New props included a splendid wheelchair and herbal cigarettes, and wardrobe came up with fine suggestions for more costumes. It’s gradually coming together.


Robert Rowe

Day 4 of our rehearsals kicked off with mega train wipe-out horror round Clapham Junction, leaving actors stranded all over the network. Record number of trains taken to get to Caterham by London actor: four. Normal service was eventually resumed, and fun was had by all as we devised a Symbolist-type extravaganza for the play-within-the-play. Some quite strange objects were pressed into use as musical instruments, and there was interpretive dancing. The audience at Chekhov’s first night booed this scene off the stage because they didn’t realise it was a send-up. No risk of that here. Some fine costumes are coming into being, referencing every style from Glyndebourne to Shoreditch, with nods to Luton and Sandhurst. There is real fire sparking in the relationships between the characters, and this will clearly not be a production of the dreaded type that once used to prevail, with everyone lying about yawning.  

Great fun - Chris and I had an interview on BBC Radio Cornwall today to talk about our Minack memories and of course promote our forthcoming production of The Seagull 1-5 June 2015. Our interview is at 1hr 14mins - you can listen here

Chris couldn't resist mentioning the time when he 'wee-ed' to put the fire out as Gulliver and the wind blew the spray all over the first 4 rows of the audience!