A Textual Analysis of Martin Crimp's Adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull: The Importance of Testimony and Relationship

Abstract

This paper argues that Crimp’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) transforms Nina’s two key speeches into two urgent acts of testimony. The paper compares Crimp’s adaptation to other, more canonical adaptations of The Seagull in the English language, such as Anne Dunnigan’s (1964) and Michael Frayn’s (1988), and concludes that, while previous translators have given Nina’s speeches a metaphysical and spiritual emphasis, making her words reflect a cosmic struggle between good and evil and thereby inserting her words within a religious framework, Crimp produces a post-Holocaust play which aims to position spectators actively with regard to the inequality of contemporary world order. Crimp’s version removes Chekhov’s references to Russia and sets the play in a bourgeois context of deceit, which simultaneously reflects a larger political context of rivalry amongst world powers. Nina’s language, in her testimonies, is both personal and political. In order to interpret the indeterminate, lyrical language of Nina’s testimonies, and to complete the picture of an unequal world order, the audience are encouraged to draw on their own experiences of oppression and duplicity in interpersonal relationships. Crimp thus invites the audience to evoke a resistant type of memory and to oppose the inequality of the existing order, as they detect the need for ethics in their personal, everyday context.