WHEN CECHOV IS REBORN THROUGH THE ACTOR

by Valentina Valentini

The ensemble that staged The Seagull (by Anton Åechov) is not the one of the “Meno Fortas” company, but a group of young actors, for the most part Italian and French, with whom Nekroæius worked in an out-of-the-way place - the Pico di Fagagna building (Udine) - in the countryside, which he loves. This project is about a work demonstration; a public presentation of a workshop, not of a show for which Nekroæius uses, as duration of the process of production, between ideation and realization, an entire year at least. We’d like to take advantage of this demonstration because it underlines the traits that belong to the artistic universe of the theatre of Nekroæius. It’s as if, through The Seagull, we could see more clearly inside his workshop, because the so-called “unfinished work” speaks louder than the finished one.
Nekroæius’ productions have the capacity to penetrate the literary text (be it Shakespeare or Åechov) more than a direct reading, as if, uttered by the actors on stage, the essence of the text is revealed in its essence, in its authentic nature. This observation does not have an objective comparison, but, the fact that his productions don’t place the problem of interpretation of the text as the primary need, is worthy of attention, given the profound fracture and the natural conflict between text and stage, between literature and theatre, given the “obstinate hostility of the stage” in making atmosphere, dreams and passions visible, given the historical battles of modern theatre with the text and for the stage. It seems to us that the organicity between words and action, between character and actor which is found in the productions of Nekroæius, originates from a work process whereby the text is not automatically interpreted by the director according to an ideological, historical or philosophical mode of reading (as in the Italian practice of directing, for example), but rather passes through the work of the actors and with the actors, through a research that takes place on multiple levels: physical, psychological, spiritual, guided but not “prepared and packaged” by the director, so that the execution ultimately belongs to the actor. And the text is neither perceived as old nor modern, able to speak in the present, without allowing the quality of “without place and time” to leave the facts and messages lacking in urgency. This capacity of Nekroæius to tell a story through the actor and the stage, in which the text passes without overburdening modernisms, without an acoustic-phonetic strain, produces a sort of ambivalent attraction in the spectator, who finds himself involved involuntarily and with pleasure in a staged tale which captures the attention like the plot of a soap opera, the rhythm of vaudeville, the gags of a comic film and pathetic music.
The staging prepared by Nekroæius for this play is simple: instead of three levels as foreseen in the 1898 stage directing indications of Stanislavskij, where the action was to take place “on the stage and behind the scenes, in the depth of the scenic picture and on its front or intermediate levels”, he set up a platform utilized by the actors - audience, occupied by windmills instead of sunflowers, zinc pails with and without water instead of a lake, objects used in Lithuanian everyday life, a tree branch which overhangs the platform, the moon represented by an iron skillet (“and this poor moon lights its own lantern in vain”), splintering chairs, tables which hide and reveal. It’s not the bare wooden floor which allows the actors major freedom of movement, nor is it “the way in which the habitable stage is lived” of the 1898 staging, which tells and talks of the people who live in the garden and the home, far away from both the “neutrality of a theatre garden of utility” and the spectacular romantic expressiveness of a beautiful setting. The scenic space for The Seagull is abstract and concrete, in function of the actors’ actions, with just a few objects with which the actors compute their performance: they ruin the chairs, they sit, they pour water from the pail, they hide under the white tablecloth that covers the table of the third act (the dining room of the Sòrin household.).
Just as in the previous Åechovian productions of Nekroæius, Uncle Vanja and The Three Sisters, the procedure is that of translating the text into theatrical action, avoiding the psychological sentimentalism of the subtext and the crepuscularism of wasted lives and unrequited love which is typical of the way the dramaturgy of Åechov has been considered for a long time in Russia. In the directing indications prepared by Stanislavskij in 1898 for the Art Theatre of Moscow, in the first act, during the representation of the work of Trepliòv, the characters are seated on a long bench along the stage, with their backs to the audience, a disposition which puts into effect the principle of a fourth wall, justified, for The Seagull, by the text itself which calls for a scene of “play within the play”. The stage of The Seagull of the Ecole des Maîtres is conceived as being double, on two levels, and the actors sit in front of the public, facing the audience, thus creating two types of spectators - the real ones in the theatre and those created by the actors - and a suspicion rises that to enforce the effect, Nekroæius infiltrated a few actors in the audience during the first act to emphasize the reactions of the spectators, for comic effect. In fact, the spectators laugh, the real audience blends in with the audience which watches the scene of Nina and Trepliòv - a group of hams - and the actors, too, are entertained.
In the production, the metatheatrical motive which runs through Åechov’s text, declined by both a historical and autobiographical perspective (the ironic considerations of a writer who saw his work and vocation as a passion - condemnation which estranged him from life by compelling him to transform sentiments, events, emotions, everything, into written material), does not loose any of its modern or historical aspects. The irony of Åechov in regards to the avantguarde movement (which brings to mind Questa sera si recita a soggetto by Pirandello), the accusations of practicing a decadent art by the “Old Guard” - the successful actress - in regards to the avantguarde - the young writer -, between adults (the mother) in relation to the young (the son), bring out the motive of the natural and inevitable conflict between tradition and innovation in a dimension which is emotional and intrapersonal as well as universal. The two antagonists bring out this motive - Trepliòv, the young aspiring writer, and Trigòrin, the successful writer -, carrying a double conflict, from an artistic and personal standpoint (the latter character is his mother’s lover). In Nina, Mascia Arkàdina, in the female characters, the pain, the tragic dimension, is tempered by other sentiments: they are able to laugh even as they cry, to skip about with innocent charm in moments of sorrow to be radiant and tender even as they are being torn apart.
In the production, the male characters incarnate the tragic dimension of Åechov’s drama: unhappy, unsatisfied characters to whom heroic actions are barred, for whom death is a declaration of impotence, the loss of the absolute, and not so much an action of Titanic challenge towards the injustice of the world. And its precisely here that the comic aspect sets in - the detachment from sentiments, the making fun of the pettiness of everyday life: the melodrama that springs forth from the emotional dissention, from the conflicts between mother and son, between lovers - Arkàdina and Trigòrin -, between who loves and is not loved back (Mascia, Nina, Trepliòv), in The Seagull of the Ecole des Maîtres, touches the two tones of tragedy and comedy, with a clownesque exageration in the performance of some of the male characters. This makes us consider how for Nekroæius the dramas of Åechov take on a tragicomic tone rather than an elegiac one; not “the melody of a dull and mediocre life”, but rather “the cacophony of the collapse of an entire cultural and historical era.”