Two masterpieces pose brutal human dilemmas, but only one moves us
The Seagull
Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1
The Life of Galileo
Olivier Theatre, London SE1
The National Theatre is offering two European heavyweights at the moment: Chekhov's The Seagull and Brecht's Life of Galileo. Both masterpieces are presented in translated "versions" by established British playwrights; both have star directors and equally stellar casts. At the curtain call for one, I was in tears of emotion. At the curtain call for the other, however, I wiped away tears of relief.
The Seagull has been drastically overhauled by the dramatist Martin Crimp, who with the director Katie Mitchell has snipped away at Chekhov's fin-de-siècle country-house-party drama to present an evening as stripped and taut as the bare walls of the Russian dacha in which the action takes place. It is a terrific revision.
Konstantin (Ben Whishaw), an intense, unformed young man, has written a play starring his lovely teenage neighbour Nina (a luminous Hattie Morahan), an aspiring actress. The play is put on before a party of friends and relations, including Konstantin's mother, the celebrated actress Irina Arkadina (Juliet Stevenson), who has rushed up from Moscow with her lover, the famous fiction writer Aleksei Trigorin (Mark Bazeley). This piece of am-dram is the catalyst for a trail of events that unfold in horrific sequence, like a row of dynamited dominoes.
Never happier than when giving snippets of her Juliet, or recounting her standing ovations, Arkadina is the sort who tells other women that they are looking dowdy and parades her latest catch in front of everyone, including her son.
Stevenson plays this brittle, ferocious force with gusto. She'll turn on the waterworks, but has enough sang-froid to focus on which high heels she'll wear for the journey home. She'll give her son a brief hug, but is just as concerned to blow her nose with middle-aged efficiency.
Mitchell shows a moral world on the brink of disintegrating in devastating style. While the ethics of the arts establishment are so louche that they will tolerate Nina performing in her underwear, they will not countenance her sexual transgression with Aleksei; indeed, they destroy her. In a brilliant touch, Nina's stage costume appears at the end, bra and knickers strung up on the wall, as if on a crucifix made from a clothes hanger.
This is a stern night, and although Chekhov gets laughs out of vain actresses and pompous doctors, the overall tone is serious. The sophisticated adults stay indoors, smoking and dancing the tango, while vulnerable youth is left outside in the wild weather to self-destruct.
There's more tango dancing in The Life of Galileo, alongside a Kurt Weill-esque cabaret, an ironing board, falsetto singing, an egg-timer, a Singer sewing machine, loads of masks and a complicated set that may, or may not, refer to the Ptolemy-inspired idea of the heavenly spheres that Galileo proved was so much tripe.
In this production, which lasts three and a half hours, the director Howard Davies has weighed down Brecht's biography of the Renaissance genius with so much clobber that it is just as well that the title role has gone to an actor as fine as Simon Russell Beale. Somewhere, occasionally, one catches a glimpse of the gripping conundrum within David Hare's version. Which is: if you discover something as fundamental as the earth's revolution around the sun, and if that goes against everything society stands for, do you shut up? Or speak out? Is the truth about the earth's - and by extension, humanity's - insignificance, worth dying for?
Galileo, who loved as much to indulge in earthly pleasures as speculate about its orbital nature, is equally anti-hero and genius, and Russell Beale is perfectly cast. Unfortunately, he functions alongside a company of cardboard cut-outs, in which only Andrew Woodall and the always brilliant Oliver Ford Davies shine, as the Pope and scary Cardinal Inquisitor, respectively. Galileo is part of the Travelex £10 season at the National, but I would pay a bit more to be transported by The Seagull.
Booking details available at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Pick of the week
Fool for Love
Apollo Shaftesbury, London W1
Juliette Lewis shows she’s not just a film star in Sam Shepard’s night of lust.
See How They Run
Duchess Theatre, London WC2
Revival of the wartime comedy that inspired Dad's Army. Classic absurdity.
Noël Coward's Tonight at 8.30
Minerva Theatre, Chichester
Two Coward triple bills of sly, scintillating stories.
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