“The Seagull”: Improvising art through life

The Nave: the perfect temporary hideaway for a temporary play. Photo Credit: Indu Chandrasekhar

The play started not with the dramatic sweep of a curtain, but with the director calling out to scoot some chairs aside and see if anyone could climb up to the balcony. These last-minute stage directions were for both actors and audience, who before the show began were indistinguishable. Then a door slammed and several men and women sprang from their seats, loudly picking up mid-conversation and winding through the audience as if they weren’t even there.

And so began “The Seagull.” The story, by Anton Chekhov, is a tangle of unrequited love, ego, jealousy, and all those other tantalisingly nasty human emotions. A basic enough premise, really—so basic that The Factory, a brazen and brilliant theatre company based in London, decided to perform the play using the personalities and interactions of the characters and improvising the rest. To perform this unique piece this past Sunday—and it really is unique, because each week brings an entirely new, improvised version of the play—The Factory set up shop in a boarded-up church on St. Paul’s Road called the Nave. The heating had long been turned off and the actual nave of the church stood in utter decay, the upper level stripped down to the vaulting and strongly resembling the attic of a haunted house. The church’s temporary, furtive opening seemed quite fitting for a play that, performed in this way, is unrepeatable.

Once “The Seagull” took off, there was no stopping. Armed with their characters’ basic outlines and nothing else, the actors brought the story to life, going by their own names and playing their parts as if slipping into a second skin. Life imitating art. To describe acting in this way seems perfectly normal, but it’s all the more stupefying when you consider that the entire play, which flowed so seamlessly, was improvised.

Watching “The Seagull” is, to put it frankly, watching the full creation of great art. The play is performed by people with such a fine sense of what makes a line, a character, and a scene perfectly fit the intended emotion, and the players read one another so well that an outsider can’t imagine they’re watching an unrehearsed performance. Picture, for example, a scene where the play’s mother and son get into an argument of epic proportions. In the middle of conveying anger, frustration, anxiety, disappointment, you name it, one of the actors called the other, on the spot, an “adolescent emotional pygmy.” How did she come up with that?

The Nave. Arguably far more eerie from the outside.

Perhaps it’s years of winning arguments with zingers like that one, perhaps it’s just from improvising the same basic story week after week. Whatever it might be, there’s no denying that this talented company is doing something truly groundbreaking—combining the processes of creating a story, scenes, and dialogue with the usually separate process of learning to act the story, scenes, and dialogue. In “The Seagull,” all of the above happen simultaneously, in an instant, and it’s all the more brilliant for it.

The next performance of “The Seagull” is at 5 pm on Sunday, 31 January at the Tabernacle, located 34-35 Powis Square, W11 2AY. Tickets are £10.

The Factory also regularly perform Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” also improvised (to a degree)—they follow the original script, but improvise stage directions and use objects brought by the audience during the play. The audience also gets to decide (via rock-paper-scissors) which actor plays which character. Needless to say, the performances are, like “The Seagull,” brilliant and unrepeatable. For more, see the account I wrote two years ago when I saw The Factory’s “Hamlet” for the first time (I have since seen it twice more).