Written by Anton Chekhov

Adapted by Mike Poulton

Directed by James Brining

Review by Dominic Corr

The Royal Lyceum

A vivid, sharp-edged debut for a new era at The Lyceum, The Seagull marries brash comic energy with moments of sombre reflection, anchored by a commanding turn from Caroline Quentin and a richly textured ensemble – featuring some of Edinburgh’s grassroots youth performers, who break into the mainstage alongside some of Scotland’s most recognisable stage performers.

Often bearing the masks of comedy and tragedy, the smashed adaptations and iterations of Anton Chekhov’s tangled comedy of thwarted ambition, hopes, and brittle longing often leave it as a trundling tragedy; but Mike Poulton’s adaptation arrives in Edinburgh as the first main-house production under James Brining’s artistic directorship at the Lyceum, and it announces a confident voice. Brining’s staging leans into the play’s humour, at times brassy and theatrical, while allowing the quieter, more melancholic cadences to seep through, so that laughter and ache live in the same breath.

A playwright, his mother, a famous novelist and a tangle of unrequited love drive the action: Konstantin (Lorn Macdonald) is a young, restless dramatist desperate for validation; his mother, Irina Arkadina (Quentin), is a fading stage star who both shelters and stifles him; around them is an orbit of central tensions, each carrying small resentments and private disappointments that accumulate into the play’s catalogue of missed chances and bruised ambitions. In short, it’s Chekov at their most prominent.

As Irina Arkadina, Quentin is the production’s gravitational centre (as the poster for the show makes clear), and every other character is drawn into the bleak, black hole that is the character’s ego of fragility. Quentin gives Arkadina the hauteur of an ageing star and the small, exhausting vanities that make her devastatingly human. She commands scenes like a seasoned conductor, pushing and pulling the room’s attention with a raised eyebrow or a sudden softness, and yet she never reduces Arkadina to mere caricature. Quentin’s performance is often as funny as it is bruising, and her presence explains why the play’s comic impulses feel lived-in rather than merely performed.

Around Quentin, bolstering their performance, is an ensemble that is workmanlike in its variety, supplying ballast. Macdonald’s Konstantin is volatile and bruised, a young playwright who alternates between bravado and raw uncertainty; his energy gives the production a jittery, contemporary edge that contrasts well with Arkadina’s practised poise. They and Quentin’s ‘clash’, alongside Macdonald’s solo scenes often carry the shows pacing. Dyfan Dwyfor’s Trigorin, is languid and oddly magnetic, the kind of literary celebrity who seems simultaneously empty and enviable; his effect on the younger characters is quietly corrosive. Irene Allan, Michael Dylan, and Forbes Masson provide sturdy supporting architecture, each finding comic inflexion and small domestic cruelties that land with clarity and bite. The inclusion of youth alumni in the cast gives scenes a pleasing generational friction; the young actors stand beside the leads without being overwhelmed, like saplings growing up next to veteran oaks; props to Harmony Rose-Bremner, Kristian Lustre, Talluah Greive.

Visually, the production is captivating; each frame and scene is a painting waiting to be hung. Colin Richmond’s set is at once spare and suggestive, a room that can be a country estate, a cramped writing space, or an emotional trap. The stage opens and closes in ways that are deliberate rather than decorative; the slowly shifting furniture and revealed corners mirror the play’s movement from buoyant sociality to private collapse. Lizzie Powell’s lighting sculpts the action with surgical precision: warm, flattering pools for the salon scenes; colder, high-contrast shafts when the play turns inward. The costuming by Madeleine Boyd does the work you expect; period-inflected without becoming an exercise in museum-piece chic, and allows actors to embody social types without being enslaved to them.

Brining’s choice to foreground comedy pays dividends: the production is quick-witted and often uproarious, with jokes that hit like corks popping. Yet this buoyancy never quite neutralises the play’s mournful core. When the laughter fades, Chekhov’s sense of missed opportunities and slow erosion is allowed its full, terrible weight. The interplay between these tones is one of the production’s strengths; it keeps the audience off-balance in a way that feels faithful to the original impulse.

Criticisms are modest, if real. At times, the velocity of the comic scenes sacrifices interiority; a few moments that call for accumulated pain register instead as well-executed set-pieces. The balance between briskness and depth could be nudged further toward the latter in places where emotional truth needs a longer burn. A small number of scene transitions feel abrupt, trimming connective tissue that might have deepened the audience’s sympathy for the younger characters.

Even so, this opening salvo from Brining’s season is promising, capturing the wound of sorrow, and bristles with confidence and charm. The production’s ability to play broad humour and pain lands precisely, Quentin’s defining inhabitation of Arkadina, suggesting the Lyceum is entering a season of exploratory, performance-led work. If this is the benchmark, audiences should expect a mix of theatrical boldness and thoughtful seriousness to follow: we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the Lyceum to bear its teeth and show a bit of sting amidst the chaff.

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