Russian Companies

“The Seagull”
Bolshoi Ballet
Bolshoi Theatre (New Stage)
Moscow, Russia
March 06, 2025

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2025 by Ilona Landgraf

Almost four years after its premiere in summer 2021, I finally saw Yuri Possokhov’s The Seagull at the Bolshoi Theatre. It was his sixth creation for the company (his seventh and latest, The Queen of Spades, premiered in 2023), and the fourth time, he teamed up with composer Ilya Demutsky. The artistic team included costume designer Emma Ryott (a longstanding collaborator of choreographer Christian Spuck) and set designer Tom Pye (who also created the designs for Possokhov’s Anna Karenina). David Finn contributed the lighting, Sergei Rylko the video design.

Chekhov’s The Seagull is labeled as a comedy, but its humor is bitter at best. Not a single protagonist leads a fulfilled life. Everybody runs after a dream world or tries to construct their realities. Family relationships are strained, and love is unrequited, quickly exhausted, or phony. Possokhov’s interpretation throws more light on some characters, and less on others, and differs in some respects from the original. Irina Arkadina (Kristina Kretova)—an actress in Chekhov’s version, a renowned ballerina in Possokhov’s—is not merely a fashionable yet greedy diva and dysfunctional mother. She shows her empathetic side when she recalls childhood memories with her elderly brother, Pyotr Sorin (Mikhail Lobukhin), whose unrealized dreams of marriage and artistic career Possokhov omitted. Like in the text, events largely unfolded at Sorin’s country estate.

While Chekhov’s Arkadina begs her handsome lover, Boris Trigorin (Vladislav Lantratov), on her knees not to ditch her for the beautiful country girl, Nina (Elizaveta Kokoreva), Possokhov’s Arkadina stays strong and in control. Though hurt by Trigorin’s blatant infidelity and irritated by the hillbilly country folk, she knew which strings to pull to keep Trigorin committed without humiliating herself. Possokhov’s Trigorin could have been an author (like Chekhov’s) or another kind of artist, but unlike his literary prototype, his ego was less endangered by self-doubt. Rather, it was boosted by the intense romance with Nina, who sparked his artistic inspiration. Experienced and clever, Trigorin exploited both women’s admiration as long as it suited him. When he tired of Nina, he discarded her like a used towel, but playing the dutiful consort of Arkadina continued to benefit him.
Arkadina lost her composure only once during a prologue, which Possokhov added. It showed a backstage view on the Bolshoi’s stage where she danced the lead from The Apotheosis of the Russian Ballet. But when the curtain call was rudely disrupted by a tattooed hooligan in a rocker outfit who turned out to be Arkadina’s son, Konstantin (“Kostya”) Treplev (Alexei Putintsev), she froze in horror. Treplev comprised everything antagonistic to his mother’s and Trigorin’s life and art, but he deep down yearned for her love and approval. Perhaps emotional deprivation triggered his pig-headed opposition. His furious search for new forms of art spawned an avant-garde ballet on a makeshift outdoor stage at Sorin’s country estate. It was led by Nina (who initially reciprocated Treplev’s utter adoration), wearing a futuristic silver tricot and cap, and employed a corps of amateur dancers from the village. Various sounds from a huge, three-and-a-half-meter wide gong and beats of wood blocks accompanied it. While the gong suggested a religious meaning, the side décor (parts of a farm tractor dangling in the red-lit air) and mechanical choreography reminded me of Fyodor Lopukhov’s The Bolt stripped of its humor. Like The Bolt in 1931, Treplev’s ballet’s only performance was its premiere, and not even that, as Treplev, enraged by his mother’s mockery, aborted the performance midway. The furor behind his rebellious jumps and leaps became formulaic the more Nina threw herself at Trigorin. After she left the countryside to pursue their love affair in Moscow and make a career as an artist (ultimately failing at both), Treplev’s pioneering mind seemed exhausted. He refashioned himself à la Trigorin and choreographed in a style his mother favored, only triter.
When Nina returned to Sorin’s estate two years later, allegedly to meet Treplev but actually to catch a glimpse of the visiting Trigorin, Treplev’s emotions didn’t concern her. Trigorin was the drug she was after. In Chekhov’s text, Nina flees from Treplev’s declarations of love. Possokhov’s Treplev threw Nina out like an unwanted parcel, discharging his dream of love for himself. He did not shoot himself afterward but fell to his death from the roots of a dead tree trunk to which he clung while the tree slowly rose. Perhaps, he had never put down roots in his life, or what he believed to be his roots offered no foothold.

The Seagull’s second unharmonious family, the Shamrayevs, managed Sorin’s estate with the help of two German shepherds. Watching Ilya Shamyarev (Alexander Smoliyaninov) keeping them on a tight leash on patrol made me think of some border security staff I wouldn’t want to mess with. The dogs barked (as they do in the play) and looked terrifying but seemed very friendly when I met them after the performance alongside their owners. Ilya was a coarse guy prone to boozing and obviously not the right match for his Chanel-loving wife, Polina (Anastasia Vinokur). Her heart belonged to the doctor, Yevgeny Dorn (Georgy Gusev), who—perhaps because he was attracted to younger females, such as Nina and Polina’s daughter Masha (Angelina Vlashinets)—didn’t reciprocate Polina’s fervent feelings. Dorn took a strong liking to Treplev’s choreography. But even when on the same wavelength (and dancing in mirror-image), Dorn had no medicine to cure Treplev.

Masha was the figure I pitied most. She pined for Treplev who shook her off like a disgusting insect every time she approached him. At the beginning of Act II, Masha—perhaps due to pragmatism or hopeless desperation—marries the teacher Medvedenko, a pansy who in the play has a dog-like obedient love for her. Possokhov literally turned Medvedenko into a nobody, a life-size, faceless puppet. This puppet sat next to Masha on the bench, its arm around her stooped shoulders. But married or not, Masha’s life remained as sad and colorless as her outfit, a simple brown dress and black cardigan.
Brown and other earth tones dominated the set for Sorin’s estate. Straw bales, dry branches, tufts of grass, and tractor tires indicated late summer and a period at its close. Only Sorin’s childhood memories were brightly colorful. Movable, wooden-framed, and slightly dusty glass partitions separated the inside of Sorin’s house from the open field or shielded the tractor, in which Treplev, driven by rampant desperation, set himself on fire. Two façade elements marked the barn where Nina and Trigorin’s hot rendezvous abruptly ended when they noticed the cheering farm hands observing them through the windows.
The seagull Treplev killed was part of a flock flying in a video on the backdrop. That he nailed it to the floor right in front of Nina (who likened herself to a seagull) didn’t prevent her from getting free from him, even if her arms hung like broken wings. The slaughtered bird only fueled Trigorin’s lust for Nina and refreshed his inspiration (as demonstrated in a crisp solo).

The Bolshoi Theatre’s side wing stage machinery remained visible after the prologue (perhaps a reminder that all the world’s a stage?), creating a fragmented look that corresponded to the protagonists’ lives.

Possokhov, who revealed in an interview that in the 1980s, Maya Plisetskaya’s The Seagull at the Bolshoi Theatre inspired him to think outside the box as an artist, made a foray into avant-gardism, but he quickly decided to develop his choreographies organically. That’s why they are convincing. For The Seagull, he employed a broad palette of styles. The complexity of the choreography varies and is, especially in some pas de deux, stupendous. The first pas de deux of Treplev and Nina was sensual yet imbued with romantic innocence. Her youthful charm even brought on spring fever in Sorin. Once she had a crush on Trigorin, the more Nina opposed Treplev’s advances, the more he pressured her. At one point, their legs were as knotted as the situation. But in the barn in Trigorin’s hands, Nina melted like wax under the hot sun as if to fulfill the pledge engraved on the locket Nina gave to Trigorin in the play—a quote from one of his books: “If at any time you should have need of my life, come and take it.”
Arkadina and Trigorin represented trendy, classy art that was refined and sometimes provocative but never crossed the boundaries of established culture. Arkadina didn’t move with the times. She kept wearing the mellow-tinted fashion of the 1970s (the pantsuits emphasizing her long, elegant lines). Trigorin was more adaptive, though the shine of his aura wore thin over time. He sported cream-white urban elegance but, maybe in response to Nina’s sexy denim mini dress, changed into jeans in the countryside. Remarkably, on his second visit to Sorin, he wore a gray suit with an ordinary cut.

Irrespective of Arkadina’s and Trigorin’s subtly fading glamour, most villagers welcomed them as harbingers of real life. When they left for Moscow, Sorin’s estate was sucked off its vitality. Treplev, Sorin, Polina, Masha, Dorn, and even some workers sat motionless and lonely as if they had converged with the landscape.

The first seconds of Demutsky’s score (played by the Bolshoi Orchestra under the baton of Anton Grishanin) would have suited a grand Hollywood drama, but then the simple melody of a woodwind instrument segued into the atmosphere of the Russian province. Its sound was checkered—fluent and harmonious at times but often dissonant and turbulent. A jarring noise underscored the absurdity of Masha’s wedding; a canny tango, the lifestyle of Arkadina and Trigorin; and a dragging rhythm, the heaviness of Nina’s and Treplev’s last encounter.
Although the performance was not a premiere, seven ushers were needed to carry the flower bouquets on stage at the curtain call.