The Seagull
Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon
****

Trevor Nunn, who once directed a memorable version of Chekhov's Three Sisters in which he underscored its notes of pessimism, frustration and despair over love, has scored a direct hit with a Seagull suffused in romantic melancholia and darkened by middle-aged sexual scheming.

Nunn's latest Chekhovian production owes much of its devastating impact to Romola Garai as Nina, the would-be actress for whom Madame Arkadina's son, Konstantin, nurses a hopeless, hopeful passion. It is a role often lost on the easy shores of sentimentality. That never happens here. Miss Garai changes your idea of what Chekhov intended.

Her Nina comes rushing or crashing onto the stage, which designer Christopher Oram cleverly converts from his King Lear set to become a handsome, pool-side Russian estate. Her excitement at the thought of acting in a piece written by Richard Goulding's rather bland, self-pitying Konstantin borders on the hysterical.

Her tremulous voice crackles and grows high with emotion. Her hands betray oodles of nervousness. For once you quickly realise that her interest in him is theatrical not sexual.

When she engages the attention of Arkadina's lover, Gerald Kyd's sexy but seriously boring Trigorin, you bear witness to sexual obsession in motion.

Eyes feasting on a man too narcissistic to give her more than a first glance and drinking in each seductive words of his, Miss Garai launches herself upon Trigorin and ends up mentally and emotionally wrecked.

Her fourth-act Nina is memorably shattered and matured by love. Ironically Nunn situates her and Goulding's far too unemotional Konstantin by the lake where she first acted for him. The doomed romancers emerge as perfect period figures and timeless ones, too.

Otherwise, though, Nunn's production, distinguished by his own eloquent version of the text, is spoiled by Frances Barber's vulgar, bawling, burlesquing of Arkadina whom she turns from famous actress into something more like popular music-hall turn. Her seduction of Trigorin slips into the farcical.

Nunn's tendency to underscore points of pathos, as with an invented scene in which we see Konstantin's suicideattempt, irritates, too. The supporting performances, though, reach superlative heights: Ian McKellen sports weird, wild hair and beard as Arkadina's dying brother, Sorin, who gently laments his wasted life.

Monica Dolan's sexually infatuated Masha and Melanie Jessop as her equally unhappy mother complete Chekhov's portrait of unrequited lovers.