The Seagull

The people in “Uncle Vanya”, last season’s master production, live out their false lives in a clay brown box. A single wall, black as night, as if drained of all human warmth and all colour, is the basis of “The Seagull” with which director Jürgen Gosch and his designer Johannes Schütz continue their Chekhov investigations at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The actors are even more naked and unprotected, demonstrating their ability to let the essence of life appear and then vanish again on the forestage under rehearsal working lights. It is the theatre itself that becomes the subject of this comedy of desperation. Old acquaintances we thought we knew appear as we have never seen them before: Corinna Harfouch’s dry, remarkably uncoquettish provincial diva Arkadina, Alexander Khuon’s unusually young belle lettrist Trigorin, whose slovenly soulfulness is all the more monstrous. They are the ones who carry on, trampling over the dawn of youth: the unsuccessful actress Nina (Kathleen Morgeneyer) is destroyed by a false love, Kostya, the failed theatrical visionary (Jirka Zett) goes to his death. Jürgen Gosch is mercilessly thorough in revealing these dissonances: in the end the whole group freeze against the black wall.