Cathal Cleary on The Seagull, with Aisling O’Sullivan: ‘I want to feel I’m being taken on a wild ride’

There’s a moment in The Seagull that has snagged in Cathal Cleary’s imagination.

In the third act of Chekhov’s play, its character Irina tends to the wounds of her 25-year-old son, Konstantin, who is recovering from a suicide attempt. He asks her to change his bandages, and she agrees. On the page it seems a rare moment of tenderness between a mother and son whose relationship is otherwise fraught.

But after spending a day rehearsing the scene for the new production that opens in Dublin later this month, which features Aisling O’Sullivan in the role, the director started to see something else emerging.

“We realised that Irina, I don’t think she wants to do it,” Cleary says. “She doesn’t want to get caught up in her 25-year-old son’s dark mental state. He may be trying to draw her back in by making himself vulnerable.

“And all she wants to do, or at least what she thinks is the best choice for both of them, is to leave. So she does the bandages, but it’s a tense, difficult thing, a reluctant thing for her to do, rather than something easy or sweet.”

Suddenly, a moment that might have been tender becomes something far more complicated and disturbing. Cleary has taken a gesture of apparent maternal care and suggested its opposite: the impulse to flee.

It is a small discovery but one that reveals something of his directorial approach and his intentions with Chekhov: to defamiliarise the material, to uncover something more challenging beneath the surface.

Here’s another moment, this time from Uncle Vanya, which Cleary directed last year. Two women, Sonya and Yelena, who have been at odds with one another, appear to reconcile. They agree to put their differences aside, have a drink and become friends. In other productions Cleary has seen, the scene is played as a moment of genuine warmth. But something about that never rang true to him.

“Chekhov doesn’t write easy relationships,” he says. “He writes tense, destructive relationships where people end up serving themselves, often out of habit.”

I’m trying to really get to the root of what was originally written, what Chekhov was after. That’s the only goal

In Cleary’s production, the apparent reconciliation is interrupted by the sudden realisation that one of the women is about to lose the person she loves. “The atmosphere becomes really intense, almost out of nowhere,” he says. “And that’s the atmosphere we have to create. That has to reverberate through the rest of the play.”

Both examples seem to favour a more anxious, bleaker reading than the one immediately apparent on the page. They’re inherently more compelling, but why is that? It can’t just be that the bleaker interpretation always feels more true.

“Most of the time we’re all very bad at emotionally expressing ourselves and dealing with consequences,” Cleary says. “If you say, ‘I don’t want to be around you,’ or, ‘Could you leave me alone,’ or, ‘No, I don’t want to help you with your bandages,’ what are the consequences of that blunt statement? We’re deeply conditioned to get on with each other, to be polite. Rudeness is not something we’re very good at dealing with.”

For him the real drama lies in what goes unsaid. “If everyone’s expressing everything they’re feeling, it’s all on the surface. There’s nothing to figure out. There’s no tension about what could be going on.

“And, actually, the audience might understand what’s going on more than the characters at different times, because it hasn’t been expressed loudly; it hasn’t been expressed overtly. Konstantin doesn’t understand what’s going on. He doesn’t see the elephant in the room, but we do. That’s exciting for us.”

Cleary isn’t interested in trying to do something different for its own sake, however. “I’m trying to really get to the root of what was originally written, what Chekhov was after. That’s the only goal.

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“There are always people seeing these plays for the first time. So it’s trying to make sure that the root of the play is being honoured and that it’s clear for audiences seeing it for the ninth time or seeing it for the first time.

“Things haven’t been redone for no reason. They’re redone because they’re there in the play. They just have to be uncovered.”

Part of Cleary’s desire to bring out Chekhov’s darker, messier side stems from his own experience as an audience member and his boredom with productions that render the plays as cosy period dramas.

“A lot of the Chekhov productions I’d seen over the years, particularly when I lived in London, felt a little restrained, almost like grown-up versions of Downton Abbey. That didn’t interest me.

“But then I saw other productions, including Sam Yates’ Vanya, with Andrew Scott playing all the characters, adapted by Simon Stephens.

“Despite being played by one person, they all seemed like broken, emotionally immature arseholes just trying to get through life. They keep missing opportunities to connect, retreating into themselves or behaving selfishly and hurting one another.

“That’s compelling to me. It reminds me of shows like Succession or Girls. The characters are extraordinary, but they’re not particularly likable. I don’t think I’d want to spend time with any of Chekhov’s characters. They’re not heroes, and that makes them much more relatable.

“They’re disappointed in their marriages, disappointed they never married, disappointed in their partners or their careers, disappointed they became artists or that they never did.

“They’re all caught up in the struggle of being alive, which is very relatable and often very funny in its silliness.”

It’s striking that Cleary’s touchstones are not Chekhov’s contemporaries, such as Ibsen or Strindberg, but more often the likes of Lena Dunham. He wants the relationships in the play to feel immediate and recognisable, which partly explains his choice of Simon Stephens’s adaptation of it.

“Any English version of The Seagull is already once removed from the original. Simon Stephens worked from a literal translation, but his language feels much more contemporary than other versions I’ve encountered, which can feel a little stuffier, more rooted in Victorian theatre.

“He wanted to modernise it without specifically setting it in the 21st century. There are no mobile phones, televisions or cars, but, equally, there’s very little that roots it specifically in 1890s Russia. That allows the characters to breathe a little more easily, the actors to relate to them more easily, and therefore the audience too.

“We had a lot of conversations with the set and costume designers about what excites us about putting on a play like this, and what hasn’t excited us about other productions. Simon Stephens’s version felt like the most interesting starting point because it doesn’t sugarcoat the characters in the way some other versions do. It gave us a way into a production that feels contemporary.”

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Alyson Cummins’s set design is relatively stripped back and representational rather than strictly naturalistic. “I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s a playful element to it. The play is so much about absence, about who’s missing, what people lack in their lives, and the moments when someone isn’t there when they’re needed, emotionally or physically. We’re trying to explore that through what the audience actually sees on stage.

“There are two famous props in The Seagull: the rifle Konstantin uses and the dead seagull, which later becomes a stuffed bird. We’re exploring the possibility of not representing those as physical objects at all.”

The aim, again, seems to be to defamiliarise the play, a task that is perhaps both more difficult and more necessary with a classic. But when you have spent years watching, reading and working on Chekhov, how do you return to a familiar scene and see something new?

“That’s the challenge,” Cleary says. “It’s just spending time with it and presuming that you don’t know it very well. When I reread Chekhov’s plays, if you’re just reading the surface, they lose my interest.”

He looks for something that hasn’t been overtly declared by the playwright. “It’s not like he’s saying, ‘Irina doubts whether or not she wants to put on Konstantin’s bandages but does it anyway.’ You kind of have to figure it out for yourself.”

Experience helps, too. Cleary recalls spending two weeks in a Royal Shakespeare Company workshop led by the director Robert Icke, who spoke about finding the root of a play: the single idea that might make the whole thing come alive for an audience.

Icke’s reading of Hamlet was that the play is about a man coming to accept that death exists. Hamlet cannot accept that his father is dead, and only when he faces his own death does he finally find a kind of liberation. “Is that true?” Cleary remembers thinking. “It doesn’t matter; it’s a brilliant way of seeing it.”

He is uncertain what the equivalent root of The Seagull or Uncle Vanya might be. But his approach involves a fundamental distrust of what the characters tell us.

“Don’t trust everything the actors are saying. Distrust their logic; distrust their take on something. Trust it to a certain extent; maybe give it credence. Why are they saying that? What’s the point of them saying that if it is true? But, more importantly, what’s the point of them saying it if it isn’t true?”

Ultimately, it comes down to keeping the play alive, allowing even the most familiar scene to become unpredictable. “That’s all I want as an audience member. I want to feel there’s a strong hand behind a production, that I’m being taken on a wild ride, somewhere exciting.”

The Seagull opens at Smock Alley Theatre, in Dublin, on Tuesday, November 24th (with previews from Friday, November 20th), and runs until Saturday, December 12th