Schiele and the Seagull

On Friday I went with some friends to the first of the Re-Enchantment Readings events in London, which, despite being cut short by a disruption halfway through, sending us out onto the pavement with paper cups and half-emptied bottles of wine, was a good night. My friends and I arrived a little early and went to a cocktail bar across the street, where in an underground room there was a Super Nintendo running Mario Kart; I played and lost.

A few hours prior we had been in Mayfair, where the vast majority of shops seem designed, counterintuitively, to discourage ordinary people from coming inside. They are patrolled by uniformly tall and thin staff, a kind of alien master race, and display sparse racks of merchandise and clothing among which, presumably, only certain items are for sale. Fashion for fashion’s sake. We were there for a small exhibition of portraits by Egon Schiele, and had walked past the front door of the gallery twice before we found it. The gallery is on the first floor of a building between two shops; beside an anonymous black door is a set of buzzer buttons, one of which is labelled with the name of the gallery on a sticker no bigger than my thumb. Were we supposed to be here?

Schiele’s portraits are characterised by their pallid colouration, the chaos and curl of the lines, and the sickliness of their bodies. Egon Schiele died in his twenties, three days after his wife Edith. In some of his self-portraits, his bones poke and stretch at thin skin that has turned green at the joints; the pictures give the impression of rigor mortis and even putrefaction that has set in before the body has actually died. I had the thought, looking at the portraits in London, that each of the bodies he portrays—so far as we take it to have an anatomy, a skeleton, beyond the surfaces we see—has its own geometry. Configurations of limbs twist together as if they are forming the shapes of letters or symbols. Faces and hands are drawn with unsteady, unplaceable scratches of pencil. All the pictures in the gallery were on paper, and most of the time the subjects of the portraits had skin that matched the colour of the paper, making the figures of the body somewhat inextricable from the ground they are drawn on. (The memory of drawing things on Microsoft Paint as a child and, after clicking the paint bucket and watching the entire screen fill with the same colour, realising you hadn’t connected the ends of the lines you had drawn.)

The portraits collected in the gallery are not Schiele’s best by any measure, but either way what prevented me from properly responding to them was the particular environment of our encounter. Such a strange contrast between the flagrancy and shamelessness of these pictures and the sanitised, commercial atmosphere of the place they were hung in. This was not a museum by any means: beside the two rooms in which the pictures were hung was an office, walled in by glass, in which an iMac sat atop a gaudy designer desk; some of the walls of the gallery were taken up by shelves of the owner’s personal art library (coffee-table books on Picasso or Cézanne; books from exhibitions at the major museums; a few of the doorstoppers like Art in Theory: 1900-1990 which routinely populate undergraduate reading lists); the Schiele pictures had no label cards next to them, but there was a tray of business cards on the front desk.

For nearly as long as museums have existed, people have accused them of devaluing art: by snatching artworks out of the scenes of our ordinary lives, the museum has reinvented art as a category all of its own, without any meaning or significance for itself. “The modern framed picture,” as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, “is not tied to a particular place but offers itself entirely by itself by virtue of the frame that encloses it.” With the creation of the museum, “we make every work of art, as it were, into a picture. By detaching art from all its connections with life and the particular conditions of our approach to it, we frame it like a picture and hang it up.”¹ In the ancient world, so the story goes, vases and statues and whatever else were beautiful but everyday objects of daily life. But what once served to hold water or consecrate a temple is now sealed behind glass in an evenly lit room; its placement in the museum confers on it an enigmatic authority, the charisma of uselessness. When this idea was taken to its limit in the last century—when urinals and Brillo boxes found their way into museums—it led some philosophers to concede that “art” can be defined, broadly speaking, as whatever a museum exhibits as art.²

But this isn’t exactly what I experienced in the gallery on Friday. While, on the one hand, seeing some of Schiele’s best works in the Leopold Museum had an effect of astonishment on me, the pictures in London seemed out of place; past a brief moment of interest, the effect wasn’t much beyond awkwardness. If inclusion in a museum confers authority on an artwork, then, inclusion in a private gallery dissolves it. The coldness of the space prevents any kind of conversation or connection between me and the picture. This is a place where clothes are not meant to be worn, where rooms are not meant to be entered, and where the appreciation of art refers to its increase in monetary value.

Last week, I went with a friend to see Chekhov’s play The Seagull directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Barbican. In the set design and costumes the play was modernised, but (as far as I can tell) most of the script remained the same—with a few significant exceptions. Just as we expected the play to begin, for instance, one of the actors (Zachary Hart) appeared on stage and addressed us directly. He asked a member of the audience what they were drinking, and then started singing a song by Billy Bragg. Halfway through the song, another actor (Tanya Reynolds) appeared on stage; by the time the song was over, the two actors had seemingly left the audience behind and begun to talk to each other. Had the play started? My friend heard a lady next to her say “Just get on with the fucking play”; by the start of the third act she had left.

Our tickets were the cheapest available, putting us right at the top corner of the theatre. Sat so high up, I had a renewed sense of the theatre as a space: we were not only looking down at the stage, but also looking down at the people who were looking forward at it. When the actors face the audience, they face the stalls; up in the gallery, we are outside of this intimate encounter and have become an audience to the audience, not just to the stage. In a theatre, although the actors (traditionally) pretend not to see the audience, the members of the audience are nonetheless still there, right in front of them. In the cinema, on the other hand, the audience is separated from the actors in space and time—the screen screens them from each other. And in the cinema, what we see happening has already happened, each movement of every actor having been set in film; the stage actor, meanwhile, is able (in theory, if not in script) to drop their character at any point. A play, therefore, must be reaffirmed, reasserted, at every moment; and so every time we see a play there are a few awkward minutes at the beginning where a more naïve part of our mind is asking, “Why is everyone pretending to be someone else?” So far as I have experienced, this never happens in film. These factors—the constant need to stage the story, to make and remake its reality, and the constant presence of an audience to whose expectant attention the story is staged—bring the issues of authority that I have just described into the theatre.

The Seagull is a really strange play, with nothing in particular anchoring its plot. In his lectures on Russian literature (I found a copy in Oxfam before heading to the cocktail bar), Nabokov describes the reception of the play in Chekhov’s time:

the average audience in Chekhov's time, as well as the critics—those priests of the average—were left rather irritated and puzzled. There has been no definite line of conflict. Or rather there have been several vague lines and a futility of conflict … Finishing the act with an obvious dead end seemed an insult to people eager for a good tussle.³

Here is a brief overview, without spoilers and with the names of the Barbican cast: The Seagull is set at the country estate of Pyotr Sorin (Jason Watkins, “Peter” at the Barbican), a retired civil servant. His sister, Irina Arkadina (Cate Blanchett), arrives for a holiday at the estate with her current partner, the successful if somewhat middlebrow writer Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke). Arkadina’s son Konstantin Treplev (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is staging an avant-garde play at the estate, starring the young actress Nina Zarechnaya (Emma Corrin), for whom he has an unrequited love. With the exception of Yevgeny Dorn (Paul Bazely), the audience—and above all Konstantin’s mother Nina—are baffled by and uninterested in the play, sending Konstantin running off in a rage of embarrassment. This all takes place within the first act; for the rest of the play we watch the attempts at romance play out between the schoolteacher Semyon Medvedenko (Zachary Hart, “Simon” at the Barbican), who loves Masha Shamrayev (Tanya Reynolds), Masha herself, who loves Konstantin, and Konstantin, who—as I said—loves Nina. As for Nina, she eventually falls for Trigorin, perhaps in part because he has found the success and renown in art that she aspires to.

The play’s title comes from a moment in the second act where Konstantin, depressed after his mother has mocked his writing, presents Nina with a seagull that he has shot. “All this began when my play failed so dismally,” he says. “A woman can never forgive failure. … You say you are too simple to understand me; but, oh, what is there to understand? You disliked my play, you have no faith in my powers, you already think of me as commonplace and worthless, as many are.”⁴ Nina is saved from having to respond to this outburst when Konstantin runs off again. Instead, she ends up talking to Trigorin, whose fame she envies. “For the bliss of being a writer or an actress I could endure want, and disillusionment, and the hatred of my friends, and the pangs of my own dissatisfaction with myself,” she says; “but I should demand in return fame, real, resounding fame!”

Trigorin, however, doesn’t see himself as successful at all. He gives a long monologue—one of the emotional high points of the play—about the difficulties of a writer’s life. Writing, he says, is a ceaseless obsession. Every conversation he has, every cloud that passes him, everything he smells in the air, every fleeting experience he undergoes must be transformed into literature, put into his own words. “I cannot escape myself,” he says, “though I feel that I am consuming my life.” That is the trap of the writing life: to feel that you are really living, you must write; to write, you must pause from really living. (I have written about this before, here and there.)

Around this point in the play, the fourth wall was broken again. Part of the way through his complaints, Trigorin (or Tom Burke?) started to ask: what is the point of writing, anyway? What is the point of art in general? He is a writer in a country that is only a few years away from revolution. He is an actor in a country that is complicit in genocide. The lights on the audience faded in, and some people nervously offered answers:

                Because we're here together.
                                                                 We're not on our phones.
                                 So that we can feel something. 

After each response, Tom Burke (or do I mean Trigorin?) offered a mostly dismissive reply, and at this point I felt that I could make sense of what the play was doing. Right at the beginning, we had been given a false start. The line demarcating where the play began, and where the actors became characters, had been blurred; and it remained blurred, as (for instance) Cate Blanchett / Irina Arkadina would read lines that could be taken as coming either from herself or from her character: “I am not a banal actor!” “I was offered the part of Juliet recently, but I turned it down.” She (Cate Blanchett) was wearing a t-shirt with her own name (Irina Arkadina) on it. It’s no wonder that a play about the struggle to be an artist, and to make art, should take on this form: when actors are never quite completely possessed by their characters, when the audience is prevented from being a passive recipient of artistic meaning, when the very borders between the play and real life are destabilised, it is because art is no longer assured of its authority to speak to us, or for us.

In an interview alongside Duncan Macmillan (the play’s co-adaptor), Ostermeier acknowledges how strange it is that amid all the wars that are going on, alongside the crises in Gaza and Sudan and Ukraine, “we are making a play about art and love or theatre and love.” And then Macmillan says this:

The Seagull is also about that contradiction—the play itself asks: can theatre, or literature or art in general, make a difference to the world? In fact, I think every great play—I don’t know if this is true, but I’m going to say it—every great play articulates that sort of crisis of confidence. Perhaps part of their greatness comes from how the form’s essential limitations have to be bent or broken in the attempt to truthfully address real-world tragedies—whether it’s Samuel Beckett or Sarah Kane or debbie tucker green.

I like the caveat of “I don’t know if this is true, but I’m going to say it” in a sentence about a crisis of confidence. The theatre, like the cinema, can feel like an inappropriate, or at least strange, place to reflect on the world outside, since it is so inside, like Plato’s cave.⁵ The Seagull suggests that the first step in dealing with this awkwardness is at least to acknowledge it, to bend and break the spaces and borders it involves.

I had gone with my friend to see the matinée, and it was still light and warm when we left the theatre. The lakeside area was full of people, and as we sat on a bench talking about the play, I watched two girls walking along the thin wall that runs along the waterway. The Barbican is a beautiful place enclosed in a rather boring part of town. When you leave, and walk through a tunnel in which you can often see orchestral instruments being loaded into the back of lorries, you come out among glass office blocks, corporate venues, buildings whose name or purpose is indiscernible. It was around seven o’clock, and hardly anyone was about, as if nothing had just happened.

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Sheed & Ward, 1989), p. 135

2. A lot of Arthur Danto’s writing is about this, e.g. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981).

3. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (Harcourt, 1981), p. 285.

4. I don’t have a copy of the script for Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation, so I am quoting from the version of The Seagull online on Project Gutenberg.

5. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 212.