Within Anton Chekhov’s 1895 tragicomic play The Seagull, about a summer gathering of actors and writers at a Russian lakeside house, there’s much discussion about finding new theatrical formats, actors staying relevant and playwrights saying essential things. As egos battle and hearts are broken, there’s also a lot of deep pain around miscommunication. 

This dazzling staging of [seagull] by Belgian company Olympique Dramatique features an experimental play staged within an experimental play. Performed in Flemish Sign Language, the production not only centres d/Deaf audiences, it breaks open new perspectives on language and understanding. The audience sits on either side of Damiaan De Schrijver and Stijn Van Opstal’s stage, with English surtitles above, while the ensemble of eight actors takes turns to tantrum, flirt and spiral into existential despair over two and a half hours. 

The intense acting requires almost Kabuki theatre or operatic levels of facial expression, where movement takes on a mime quality, telling the emotionally chaotic story non-verbally for the vast majority. An occasional sound effect is used sparingly and superbly; when the glamorous yet narcissistic actress Arkadina brings a card for her son, it squeaks a tinny musical tune into the silence, trite and inappropriate. Later, gunshots carry extra shock value as they ring through the quiet theatre. The luvvie melodrama and intergenerational conflict feels heightened by the limitations of language or ambiguities of meaning, and we feel the effort of moving our heads to study lips, hands and moving text for clues.

Famously, it was Chekhov who advised his brother to use vivid, sensory details for good writing, rather than naming things outright, often paraphrased as the maxim, ‘show, don’t tell’. Here, the layered languages and grand actions seem to tell us essential, new things about the spaces between what we say and what we feel.

Studio Theatre, 10 & 11 August, 7.30pm; picture: Julie Broadfoot.

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