KRISTIN Scott Thomas is an actor who doesn’t act. Rather, she moves into a character, breathing the same air as a human reality.
It’s a style heaven-sent for the plays and people of Anton Chekhov, as she’s now demonstrating as Arkadina, the overbloomed actress who sweeps her way through “The Seagull” in the wonderfully subtle production that opened last night.
This is a play about thrown-away lives and spiritual emptiness, and here it’s staged with natural fluency by Ian Rickson, with an elegant new adaptation by Christopher Hampton that sounds as though it were written the day before yesterday. No wonder it was a hit in London.
Chekhov’s plays reveal a society at odds with itself, and he expected a new kind of realistic, natural behavior from his actors. More than any playwright before him (don’t let’s count Shakespeare), Chekhov expects his actors to be real right down to their toenails.
There are no small roles in “The Seagull,” even though it is around Arkadina’s whims and fancies, artifices and beguilements, that the play’s action – comic and tragic both – revolves.
Arkardina is a great role, and Scott Thomas – the classic beauty of “The English Patient” and the jaded pal of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” – gives a great performance. With her leonine patrician profile, puffs of dismay, snorts of delight and petty diva excesses, she gives a perfect portrait of an actress close to the top of that first downward swoop.
Eyes bright with a manic gleam of fear, she’s fighting off middle age with that gallantry only actors of a certain age can muster.
Not all of the cast – many of them imported from the original British production – is at her level, but then, how could they be? Particularly fine is Carey Mulligan, who makes a luminous and touching Nina, the aspiring young actress. Mackenzie Crook is a properly haunted Konstantin, Arkadina’s doomed son.
They are well served by Rickson’s staging, which suggests the stealthily torpid atmosphere of a somewhat seedy, bourgeois Russian country house at the turn of the 20th century. The scenery and costumes by Hildegard Bechtler, the lighting by Peter Mumford, the sound design of Ian Dickinson (you’ll hear twittering birds around you before the lights even go down) and music composed by Stephen Warbeck – all imported from the original, Royal Court production – play their part in the Chekhovian magic bullet of loss and despair.
THE SEAGULL
Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St.; 212-239-6200.