Why Chekhov’s Arkadina is the holy grail for all great actresses
“O, is there anything more boring than this pure country boredom?” says Arkadina, the celebrated actress privately terrified of her fading status in The Seagull. It’s a line that could have been spoken by any one of Chekhov’s characters in any one of his plays, but it carries an extra volt of electricity in the words of Arkadina who, perhaps more than any Chekhov creation, is horrified by the prospect of stagnation.
Fear of stagnation is the great Chekhovian theme, of course; that invidious geographical and psychological condition that eventually forces all his characters into a reckoning with the futility of their individual lives. Yet for Arkadina, that fabulously bitchy middle-aged narcissist who measures her professional, sexual, even her existential worth in the adulation of others, and who provides actresses with one of the truly tremendous roles in theatre, there is no greater defining crisis than irrelevance.
This week it was announced that Cate Blanchett would return to the London stage next February as Arkadina in Thomas Ostermeier’s new revival of Chekhov’s great tragic comedy of artistic rivalry, vanity and crushing disappointment. Blanchett as Arkadina is a mouth-watering prospect – a character of titanic ego, voracious need and mid-life neuroticism, with a beautifully honed line in devastating put-downs: “All dressed up, nice looking. Aren’t you a clever girl?” she says to Nina when her brother Sorin compliments the aspiring much younger actress on her appearance.
What’s more, it’s a coveted role for actresses at the peak of their career, with Annette Bening, Kristin Scott Thomas, Meryl Streep, Judi Dench and Joan Plowright among those who have tackled this most seductive and slippery of monstrous mother figures.
Yet how to capture the infuriating contradictions of the undoubtedly gifted Arkadina, who feels threatened by everyone from her avant-garde playwright son Konstantin, to the promising Nina, Konstantin’s unrequited love, whose carefully concealed despair also serves as a prism for the illusory glories of acting itself?
The very best performances have understood that Arkadina is first, foremost and perhaps almost entirely an actress, a woman who turns every gesture into a performance, and who is nothing without the blinding validation of the spotlight.
Scott Thomas, who starred in Ian Rickson’s star-studded production at the Royal Court in 2007, nailed the character’s ostentatious displays of condescension with particular pleasure, bringing a knowing lofty flamboyance to every waspish backhanded insult flicked at Carey Mulligan’s unusually spirited Nina and Mackenzie Crook’s feverishly tormented Konstantin, but also a calculating intelligence.
By the same token, some critics thought Judi Dench too naturalistic a performer to fully embrace Arkadina’s extravagant hauteur when she played the role at the National in 1994. Yet Dench – that most subtle and steely of actors – found great nuance in the character’s theatrical armoury, and also immense wit.
When, in the pivotal scene Arkadina throws herself in desperation at her faithless lover Trigorin, sensing he is about to leave her for Nina, Dench sealed her triumph at his capitulation by tapping her lover, played in that production by Bill Nighy, on the crotch. Scott Thomas, for her part, simply turned to the audience and said “Got him!”.
Other actresses have struggled with the part’s inherent comedy, with Plowright, who played the role opposite Helen Mirren at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1975, and Juliet Stevenson, at the National in 2006, praised for unlocking Arkadina’s magnificent conceitedness but not necessarily her innate comic absurdity.
But many more have excelled in otherwise flawed or mediocre productions: Indira Varma discovered the character’s intoxicating withering verbal defence mechanisms in Jamie Lloyd’s not entirely successful conceptual production in the West End in 2022; Annette Bening was both splendidly entertaining and entirely heartbreaking in Michael Mayer’s 2018 film adaptation which received mixed reviews.
So what can we expect from Blanchett, who has particular skill at parsing the clashing, often dislikable complexities of the feminine ego? Note, for instance, her extraordinary performance as the imperious conductor Lydia Tar in Todd Field’s recent eponymous film. She’s also a risk taker, a necessary quality when working with Ostemeier, whose productions of classic plays tend to both boldly defamiliarise and bring them bang up to date.
This, I suspect, will be the key to this revival and hopefully also to Blanchett’s performance, of a woman who in her hubristic self-absorption seems to inhabit the solipsism of the age. Blanchett, who can do glacial superiority along with the best of them, is also possessed of the sort of compassionate, uncompromising intelligence essential for exposing this very 21st century character. For, as Konstantin says of his ghastly, infuriating mother, “It’s not happening if it’s not about her.”
The Seagull opens at the Barbican Theatre, London, in February 2025; barbican.org.uk
