Alexander Molochnikov is bringing his production of Seagull: True Story to London. We talked to him about the production and more

– Seagull: True Story has just played in New York. Very soon, in the fall, you will bring the play to London – and for six and a half weeks at once. For a foreign theater, this is a serious request. How did you decide to do it?

– This is the result of an initial attitude: if we do something, we should do it “from here”. Firstly, in English, and secondly, taking into account the system, which in America and in England is quite different from ours. When you realize what an American performance is, you are immediately taken aback – everything is much more expensive, and distribution is organized according to different rules. You think: well, what is it – three weeks and that’s it. In Russia, plays go on for years, my first one at the Moscow Art Theatre has been running for 11 years. But now we have had 17 screenings in New York and 45 in London – 62 in total. If there is another run in New York, and we are counting on it, we will reach a hundred. This is already a full-fledged theatrical life – not every production of a repertory theater lives up to this.

The rental format is different, compressed, but interesting. When you play every day, rather than once a month, the play also develops in its own way, it gains breath.

– So the play can change right during the rental?

– Not in New York, unfortunately. According to local rules – and not the nicest ones – you can’t change scenes or text after the premiere. The audience has to see the play that the critics wrote about, which is nonsense, in my opinion, a live performance still changes a little bit every time, but in London it’s easier, as far as I found out, you can clarify something.

– “Seagull: True Story,” read by Alexander Molochnikov, is not quite Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” What are the differences between the performance and the original play?

– It’s not The Seagull at all. It’s a play about a director putting on The Seagull. We have scenes from the play, but the production is more about a young man named Kon (Konstantin) who is trying to keep his free play about finding new forms. His mother is a prima donna at the Art Theater and plays Arkadina for him. While he is working on “The Seagull” at the MHT, the war of 2022 begins, the play is cut in Russia, and Kon tries in every way to preserve its artistic value by moving the production to New York. But things are not easy there either – other cultural codes, other expectations.

The action of the play takes place in different periods: Russia before the war and after, America under Biden and America under Trump. These are four different political climates, and all this affects not only the play, but also the protagonist.

– Con is an autobiographical character?

– Of course, in many ways. Although my mother is not an actress and does not work at the Art Theater. Besides, not only the protagonist, but also many of the characters in the play, are collective images. For example, Kon’s close friend is his mentor. I didn’t have one such person, but this character was assembled from several important people who influenced me as a director during my studies and work – Anatoly Smelyansky, Oleg Tabakov, Olga Henkina, and since this character is arrested, Kirill Serebrennikov and Zhenya Berkovich are there.

– You have assembled an interesting international team. You, Sofia Kapkova, the producer, and Andrei Burkovsky – he plays on stage. And Sofia and Andrei have been working in parallel on the play Our Class in New York, which has already received awards and excellent reviews from critics.

– It’s interesting that Andrei got into “Our Class,” which, by the way, won the award for best off-Broadway play, after the workshop of what became “Seagull: True Story”. Sonia was just helping us find a venue at the time, saw it at a screening – and invited it. Now two years have passed, during which we worked on the play with a different cast, with American producers, but at the last stage it became very difficult to work with them. Then Sonia joined us and literally saved the project – she gave it a powerful final push.

It was the right decision – and at the right time, because we both went through the American experience, hit bumps and met others. At least America has definitely changed me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I accept everything now(laughs) – I still think a lot of things are wrong with them, but I understand the rules and I know, I’m learning how to interact with them. Mostly I’m talking about the unions, which kind of protect the rights of artists.

– In what ways do the limitations manifest themselves?

– For example, you can’t give the actors direct feedback after the premiere. Only through the stage manager – what we call an “assistant director”. If you just want to talk, you can’t, unless the actor himself comes up. It’s very unusual, because Russian repertory theater is built on the fact that the director keeps changing things without end, rehearsing, gathering everyone before – and I worked like that too. And here, it’s by the rules. Fortunately, in New York we managed to find someone with whom we understand each other – although it’s different, it’s not like I’m completely handing over the work on the play to her.

– And as an actor, how do you feel about such a system?

– I think we should judge by the global result. And the result is that today American theater is not part of the world theater culture. It is a kind of separate hierarchy – Broadway, performances with stars, the West End, sometimes Paris. But it has nothing to do with Avignon or Edinburgh – and these are the pinnacles of theater, where directors from all over the world, including Asian and Latin American countries, aspire to go.

American theater is basically text-centric and actor-centric – three chairs on stage and go. Usually it’s well acted, but it lacks the director’s will, the language. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something different, more complex, and also find your audience. People watch different movies, so they can love another theater. Of course, I will continue to look for my own language, otherwise what’s the point of all this? We’ve had big actors come to our screenings and say that this is exactly what they would like to do. Now we’ll see if they go beyond words.

– You said that work on the play has been going on for two years. It turns out that the idea and the script emerged almost immediately after you moved to New York?

– Practically. About a month after I moved in, I had a public talk, and a man in a suit came up to me and offered me a rehearsal space. I didn’t even know what I was going to put on at the time, but of course I agreed. Then one day Dmitri Krymov, who was already working in New York, didn’t have a rehearsal room – and I told him about this man. I called him, and we agreed to meet – at a skyscraper, right in the center of New York’s theatrical world.

He showed me the premises – it was an abandoned office. My new acquaintance, as it turned out, worked as a plumber in this building, so he was constantly feeling the wiring, checking the bathrooms(laughs). So we started rehearsing. Krymov first. It was surprising to see Dmitry Anatolievich not in the theater chair, but on the floor. But in 10 minutes, while I was running for chairs, in this abandoned office, his theater began to absolutely begin – the actors are American, but the music and the laws of the genre are the same as what I saw in Moscow. After these rehearsals, Krymov has already staged several successful productions in New York, played on the stage of the Prague National Theater, and will soon be in London.

Then we came to this office. I first wrote the script for Seagull: True Story myself, and then spent a year and a half rewriting it with an American playwright, Ely Rarey. Andrei Burkovsky, who played a lot of leading roles at the MHT, flew in from Los Angeles to rehearse almost on his own dime. We had practically nothing – it all went to pay the actors and rent a hall to show the work to the audience.

But after three years we all built something up – and we did quite well. For example, Max Didenko won four prizes for Off West End for White Factory. We’re presenting Seagull: True Story soon in the same theater where he was. And in New York we played it at La MaMa, where Krymov staged it.

– It turns out that new theatrical “points of attraction” are already forming in different parts of the world?

– Yes, and these are places completely unrelated to Russia, and what matters here is how the director works with the place and the audience. In my opinion, it would be a mistake to repeat what we did in Moscow. And it would also be a mistake to copy the West completely. I think we are looking for a third form that will be understood and loved by us, a kind of etude, visual, experimental theater. Where an attempt at a miracle emerges from a “black box”, capable of taking the spectator into another world, but at the same time not becoming completely incomprehensible to them, so that there will be someone in the audience.

At the same time, it is important to take into account that Western audiences have different genetic and cultural codes in many respects. For example, in New York we had a hall where 60% of the audience was English-speaking and 40% Russian-speaking. This happened because we made the play with an international audience in mind. And the themes – human interaction with the system, censorship – are clear to everyone. Although initially we were working on an adaptation of The Seagull set in the Chelsea Hotel – and it seemed to me at the time that the New York story was the bridge. But at the workshops we saw that no one here knows The Seagull thoroughly, and is not ready to watch a strange adaptation of it. In Russia, everyone knows everything, but here it doesn’t work. We need to reassemble it. We need a universal story. And it became clear that the events that happened to us, quite Shakespearean – war, broken ties, hatred of each other and great love.

– You know for a fact that Thomas Ostermeier’s The Seagull, starring Cate Blanchett, recently had a run at the Barbican. According to the reviews, non-Russian-speaking audiences loved the play – it brought together everything they needed for a great success. The Russian-speaking audience was divided: some liked it, others, as is often the case, thought that “the classics had been remade”.

– Those who criticize reworked classics live in a different time. It is to them, first of all, that I would highly recommend coming to our performance – in it we talk about why it is not just possible, but necessary to rethink the classics. After all, the people who wrote these texts a hundred years ago were complex, alive, free. Chekhov did not get out of brothels at some periods of his life, Dostoevsky lost everything in casinos. What makes you think they’re as boring as you are? That they dreamed of having their plays staged with heavy pathos, slowly and importantly?

I think Chekhov would have been shocked by some productions of himself and wouldn’t have understood what this strange form was at all – and how it applied to him. But he would certainly be curious to hear what his text sounds like, and he would, I think, be glad that the text is alive! If he wrote a play about a man who was looking for new forms, it means that he understood the value of such a character. And he was an innovator himself. I admit that he would not immediately understand why Butusov plays the same scene four times, but he would have left the theater with some interest. And the spectators who demand “not to touch the classics” – well… Well, let them come! Let’s try to answer their questions with a performance.

– But it is interesting that Ostermeier chose The Seagull for himself. And he is, of course, far from being the only English-speaking director who continues to work with Russian classics – every season there are some new productions.

– Because it is such a great literature that it cannot be undone. All educated Englishmen and Americans grew up on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev – just as they grew up on Fitzgerald or Byron. These texts are already in their blood, and, fortunately, have stayed with us despite all the catastrophes. But in truth, no one in America has ever tried to abolish these books.

Back in ’23, I was at a play based on poems by Silver Age poets. A musical, expensive, in a good hall – and it was not staged for Russian audiences. Almost the entire audience was American. I sat there and wept. And not from nostalgia, but from how it suddenly became meaningful. It seems to me in general that I began to feel more strongly about this whole, as they say, “Russian culture”. It’s not that I didn’t live it before – I did, of course – but now some new layer has appeared. Maybe even a patriotic one, in what seems to me to be a love of the motherland.

– And if there had been no war, would such a change have been possible?

– There could be something, sure. But it’s not that I can’t go back. It’s a pathological situation not to be able to simply go to my grandparents’ dacha. It shouldn’t be like that – and not only in my case. I grew up in Russia, lived there for thirty years – and suddenly it’s all cut off. But I did not feel alienated from the culture, on the contrary, I felt a new closeness.

Al Pacino, with whom I once had the good fortune to have dinner, said: “Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, saved my life.” He meant that he started playing them in a small theater in the Bronx and literally survived. That’s something like that right there, thanks to them.

– Back to the play: there’s one show in London in October where you’ll be taking to the stage. Excited?

– I’ve done it once before in New York. In general, I haven’t acted on stage for a long time, but I enjoyed it. I used to often replace actors in my productions at the Moscow Art Theatre or the Bronnaya Theater if someone fell ill. It’s quite different from doing a role in someone else’s work. Plus there’s an autobiographical element to it, which is clear to me. I don’t play myself, but I understand a lot of things, like…..

– And if there is a performance going on – where do you feel most comfortable: in the audience, backstage, on stage?

– Nowhere! The most comfortable thing is to be somewhere out of the way and then find out it went great. Everything else is constant excitement. But it’s probably a little easier on stage. If the performance is going well, you’re inside it and don’t have time to think. But sitting in the auditorium is an ordeal, you can’t get used to it.

However, it was different with this performance. In New York, when the second act was going on – the American act, which was born in the course of the work – I suddenly realized that I was just sitting there smiling. No nerves, no criticism in my head. Just some kind of gratitude that this play exists at all. I was watching it as if for the first time, as if it wasn’t my own. And that is probably the best feeling one can have.