Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: The Seagull is an evening of convention-busting Chekhov

Such imaginative liberties are, indeed, the trademark of director Thomas Ostermeier, whose production with Florian Borchmeyer of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People lit up the West End last year. In this case, adapting Chekhov’s original text with Duncan Macmillan, he has gathered an astonishing ensemble cast, led by Cate Blanchett as the actor Irina Arkadina: grandiose, always performing, tap-dancing her way into the splits. Not to be outdone, Jason Watkins as her ailing brother, Peter Sorin, tries his hand at break-dancing.

Arkadina’s son Konstanin Treplev (Kodi Smit-McPhee, so good in Maria) aspires to true artistic integrity and despises his mother’s lover Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke, wonderfully measured), a successful writer wracked with doubt about the worth of his calling.

Konstanin adores Nina Zarechnaya (Emma Corrin, tremendous as ever), who performs in his play while the other characters wear VR goggles. He, in turn, is loved by Masha Shamrayev (Tanya Reynolds) who, for her part, does not reciprocate Medvedenko’s passions. Tangled, isn’t it? As Trigorin grows intrigued and then obsessed by Nina, the comedy is fast eclipsed by tragedy.

The symbolism of the eponymous bird – killed and stuffed – has been a matter of debate since the play’s first performance in 1896. Here, it seems to represent Nina’s initial emancipation and subsequent emotional captivity. It also speaks to Chekhov’s preoccupation with the significance of art: is it life-enhancing or vampiric?

On this matter, Burke delivers one of the play’s most powerful monologues with panache: “Literature is dead. And it deserves to be! What use are stories when the world is ending? We don’t need novelists. We don’t need exquisitely wrought exploration of the human condition – we need activists.” And – in a pin-drop moment – he ad-libs a tribute to Volodymyr Zelensky.

Nor is it an accident that the production’s musical refrain is the Stranglers’ Golden Brown, a song about heroin. The characters are addicted to art, to an idea of love, to thwarted dreams of what life can be. Ostermeier gives his stellar cast the space and freedom to explore these themes to the bitter end.

Mickey 17
(General release)

Six years after his Oscar-winning masterpiece, Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is back with this oddball sci-fi comedy – a return, really, to the dystopian themes he explored in Snowpiercer (2013) and the bioethics of Okja (2017).

It is 2054: Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson, in good form), on the run from a murderous loan shark, signs up as a passenger on a colony ship headed to the planet of Niflheim under the leadership of Trumpesque populist and cult idol Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his sinister wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). 

The catch is that he can only secure a berth as an “Expendable”: obliged to die and be replicated repeatedly, thanks to the controversial new technology of “human printing”. If there is a lethal medical experiment that requires a subject, or a dangerous repair job to be done in space, Mickey is tapped for the task. His corpses are thrown into the ship’s waste incinerator – and another Mickey is printed off using recycled organic waste, his memories restored from a data brick.

Doing his best to be stoic about this – when he learns that he’s going to die yet again because of exposure to lethal radiation, he says: “Oh – OK” – he manages, through multiple resurrections, to maintain a romantic relationship with security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie). But things get trickier when the ship reaches Niflheim, whose icy wastes are already inhabited by a race of large-fanged, insectoid “creepers” (Bong’s imagination never fails when it comes to strange creatures).

Though it riffs on the moral choices facing the lookalike, in clear homage to A Tale of Two Cities, Mickey 17 – based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton – does not aspire to the transcendent heights of Parasite and, except in star wattage and budget, cannot truly be said to mark a significant leap forward for Bong. All the same: it is richly entertaining, visually compelling and, as you would expect from one of the world’s greatest directors, a clear cut above the cineplex norm.

The Leopard
(Netflix)

If, like me, you’re a devotee of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of the Risorgimento, published posthumously in 1958, and Luchino Visconti’s stunning movie adaptation of 1963 (Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon), you might approach this six-part Netflix drama with a measure of scepticism.

Happily, there is still plenty of creative juice to be squeezed from the femminello lemon of Lampedusa’s masterpiece. Kim Rossi Stuart is very good indeed as Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, whose feline nickname is a reference to the family crest, confronted by Garibaldi’s redshirt army and its campaign to seize Sicily from the House of Bourbon.

Fabrizio’s beloved but impoverished nephew, Tancredi Falconeri (Saul Nanni) embraces the revolutionary spirit. “Our vanity is more powerful than anything else in the land, stronger than any army,” says the prince. To which Tancredi replies: “Uncle, if we want everything to remain as it is, then everything must change”.

Directed by Tom Shankland and written by Benji Walters and Richard Warlow, this version of The Leopard is visually spectacular, both in its portrayal of the Sicilian landscape and its sumptuous tableaux: the dinners, the dances, the ceremonies of an old order yielding place to new. 

As Tancredi shifts his affections from his besotted cousin Concetta (Benedetta Porcaroli) to Angelica Sedara (Deva Cassel), daughter of Don Calogero Sedara (Francesco Colella), the rough-hewn, new-money mayor of Donnafugata – and the prince approves – the personal and political become poignantly entwined.

A quibble: the sumptuous production finds insufficient space for the plangent decay and sense of entropy that are at the heart of the novel. But this is still quite something, a gamble that pays off handsomely.

Fear
(Prime Video)

When Martyn Berwick (Martin Compston), his wife Rebecca (Anjli Mohindra) and their two children move into a grand house in Glasgow’s West End, they are full of excitement and hope. A shame, then, that the basement tenant Jan Boyd (Solly McLeod) is such a weird and (soon enough) menacing figure.

Initially sympathetic, their new neighbour (“I buy and sell NFTs”) quickly escalates from leaving housewarming gifts to making horribly creepy remarks to Rebecca. The Berwicks seek help from the police and a lawyer, beginning to panic as Jan accuses them of abusing their own children.

Mick Ford’s crisply written adaptation of Dirk Kurbjuweit’s 2013 novel soars above the usual tropes of stalker drama by digging into Martyn’s own embattled sense of masculinity: his architectural practice is faltering, he is threatened by Rebecca’s return to work in the lab as a genome researcher, he struggles with his father Allan (James Cosmo), a former para, and tattooist brother Brian (Daniel Portman) who scorns his middle-class aspirations. “Can you live with the fact that, when it came to it, you did nothing to protect your family?” says Allan to his deeply troubled son.

Compston is, as always, excellent, portraying a quite different character to DI Steve Arnott in Line of Duty. Tightly framed in three episodes, Fear is well worth your time.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(4th Estate)

Whenever I am ready to give up on contemporary fiction, and its well-behaved silos of smugness, along comes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to restore my faith. It has been twelve years since her last novel, Americanah, but Dream Count – expansive, indifferent to categorisation, broad in scope and ambition – more than makes up for the wait.

Its framework is provided by the entangled lives of four women: Chiamaka, a travel writer living in Maryland; Zikora, a lawyer in Washington, D.C; Omelogor, who has returned to Nigeria after studying in America; and Kadiatou, who is Chiamaka’s housekeeper. The “dream count” of the title is a variant on “body count”, suggested by Chiamaka’s googling of past lovers.

“I thought of all the beginnings,” she reflects, “and the lightness of being that comes with beginnings. I grieved the time lost in hoping that whatever I had would turn to wonder. I grieved what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by”.

This sifting is prompted by Covid lockdown, and the reverberations and reckonings of pandemic course through the novel. Its depth charge is Kadiatou’s horrific ordeal at a hotel in Washington, where she is attacked and raped by a VIP guest (“animalistic, possessed, a brute animal”). As Adichie writes in an afterword, this is intended to be a “gesture of returned dignity” to Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who cleaned rooms in a New York hotel, and was allegedly raped in 2011 by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund.

As Omelogor concludes, watching Kadiatou being interviewed on television, “immigrants are desperate to raise children who think they have a right to dream, and what she needs is an America that understands this.”

Adichie’s sense of justice is matched by a disdain for virtue-signalling: “Their conversations were always greased with complaints; everything was ‘problematic’, even the things of which they approved. They were tribal, but anxiously so, always circling each other, watching each other, to sniff out a fault, a failing, a budding sabotage. They were ironic about liking what they liked, or fear of liking what they were not supposed to like, and they were unable to feel admiration, and so criticized people they could simply have admired.” 

In similar spirit, she skewers the silliness and laziness of modern language (“explore”, “share”, lunch that is “grabbed”). Dream Count is a vivid exploration of intimacy, the nature of home and migration, the yearnings of the heart and the frayed fabric of human connection. Unmissable.