How can a masterpiece be recognized? Unquestionably by the fact that it is played and replayed, year after year, because it always arouses the curiosity of the artists that seize on it and that of the spectators who come to hear it again, its questions still appearing topical. The Seagull remains in history; it is still active and undoubtedly necessary and unique. It is obviously so for Arthur Nauzyciel, who wanted to have it performed in the Cour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace, a venue that has become an emblem of the artistic practice of the theatre, but also the historic venue of a bi-millennial spiritual adventure. This play that speaks – using the director's words – about “art, love and the meaning of our existences”, written at the end of that 21th century that was dying without clearly imagining what the 20th century, nonetheless so near, would be, is also haunted by memories, melancholy, ruins and hope. Faith in art, the expectation of reciprocal love: these feelings would not resist the reality of a world in which death stalks, the one of seagulls abandoned at the edge of lakes and of idealistic artists who, like Tréplev attempting to dream of another theatre, are brutally rejected. What might be nothing but a melodrama built around a sarabande of impossible loves – since no one loves the person who loves him or her –, becomes a funereal and metaphysical ball, a genuine parable on man's condition. Arthur Nauzyciel once again wished to “talk about resuscitating the dead”, persuaded that the author Anton Chekhov “consoled souls” like the doctor Chekhov saved suffering bodies. By going through The Seagull again, he will cross ghosts in it, those of the Russian writer, but also Hamlet and the heroes of the Oresteia, who witness the link with the past to build theatre that is done in the present, a theatre of urgent necessity. JFP
“I am writing it, not without pleasure, even if I am going against all the laws of the theatre”: this was how Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) described in 1895 to his friend Suvorin the play he was writing. The Seagull was the first of the great plays of Russian dramaturgy and sealed the beginning of his collaboration with Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko. After the fiasco at its premiere in Saint Petersburg, the play was enormously successful, especially when they staged it at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899. Next came Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, which put the finishing touches on the aura of this doctor by training, who probed as no one else, the tragic aspect of our existences. Anton Chekhov is one of the most often staged playwrights in the world today.
Distribution
direction Arthur Nauzyciel
translation André Markowicz, Françoise Morvan
scenography Riccardo Hernandez
lighting Scott Zielinski
choreography Damien Jalet
music Winter Family, Matt Elliott
sound Xavier Jacquot
costumes José Lévy
masks Erhard Stiefel
with Marie-Sophie Ferdane of the Comédie-Française, Xavier Gallais, Vincent Garanger, Benoit Giros, Adèle Haenel, Mounir Margoum, Laurent Poitrenaux, Dominique Reymond, Emmanuel Salinger, Catherine Vuillez
and the musicians Matt Elliott together with Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine (Winter Family)
Production
production Centre dramatique national Orléans/Loiret/Centre
coproduction Festival d'Avignon, Région Centre, Theater of Lorient, National Drama Center of Brittany, Theater of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines National Stage, Maison des Arts de Créteil, Le Parvis National Stage Tarbes Pyrénées, Le Préau regional arts centre for theatre of Basse-Normandie Vire, Le phénix National stage of Valenciennes, the National Theater of Norway, Maison de la Culture of Bourges National stage and France Télévisions
with the support of the Institut français and of the Town of Orléans
Through its support, the Adami helps the Festival d'Avignon to get involved in coproductions.