Chekhov with his comedy The Seagull turned notion of theatre of his time upside down. After more than a century Finnish theatre director Kristian Smeds with a great respect to the text however rips up the play and discovers there a new potential.
“Run, new forms are coming!” says Juhan Ulfsak’s Treplev to his mother Arkadina played by his real father Lembit Ulfsak. A cult figure in Soviet films, Lembit Ulfsak is now one of the mainstays of the Estonian Drama Theatre. Aleksander Eelmaa, playing the part of Trigorin, also had a long run at the Drama Theatre, but his son Taavi Eelmaa appears in The Seagull as Semjon Medvedenko, the teacher. Helgi Sallo, alias Sorina, is one of Estonia’s brightest operetta stars, and daughter Liina a core member of Von Krahl, even though she does not appear in The Seagull.
Kristian Smeds: “I’d long been debating various ways of approaching Chekhov’s The Seagull, for though it is to a great extent about art and artists, it also addresses generational conflict. The Von Krahl players family backgrounds gave the play an interesting dimension, introducing a new plane to Chekhov’s complex text. With this cast there is a nice interplay of fact and fiction.” The real „new and old school” theatre battle takes place on stage. And tomatoes flying onto the stage during one of the final scenes are also real…
Alongside the acknowledgment that a life not shared is meaningless, one of the major themes of this cruel, but intensely entertaining production is the clash of generations in life, as in art. The Seagull is about the art itself as well. As Smeds has said: “It is important to be able to question the whole point of theatre and theatre-making. What do you do and why. Do the contents you create have any value? If the answer is yes, then what and for whom?”