Nina review – a riveting series of horribly invasive auditions for The Seagull

Smile. Introduce yourself. Say you’re such a big fan. Now do whatever he tells you. These are the unspoken rules the women follow as they take turns auditioning in Caroline Williams’ discomforting, rage-fuelled production about men and power and rotting winged roadkill.

The women are auditioning for the role of Nina, the aspiring actor in Chekhov’s The Seagull, in an experimental production directed by sombrely pretentious wunderkind Goran (a brooding Rowan Polonski). Using live-feed cameras in his show, he is the type of director to dismiss the need for an intimacy coordinator while claiming credit for having one in the room.

As the women file through, Goran’s requests to his Ninas (Maya Bartley O’Dea, Nina Bowers, Samantha Begeman and Gemma Barnett) become increasingly invasive. They slide from small, needling questions that might be deemed permissible from a truth-seeking visionary, to commands that are so terrible they could crack a person in two. Tell me your trauma, he demands. Show me what that looks like. The women are eager to please, eager to work, and Goran has the power to make them a star. Watching on, writer Tim (Joseph Payne) is a timid bystander, reading in for sour, lovesick Konstantin as Chekhov’s play slips in and out of both focus and reality.

As tension builds, our play, co-directed by Williams and Deborah Pearson, grows in scale and beauty too. Bowers’ exquisite, harrowing birth scene splits open the show’s depths of earned fury, while Begeman has a distressing masturbation scene. Projected loud and large across the stage, the latter is almost too hard to watch, but this show demands we bear witness.

The final switch of power is an artistic act of wish fulfilment. It may be what we would dream of for these women but it rings hollow for the world the show has so carefully and grimly constructed. Williams and Pearson’s unflinching direction is most compelling in its bleak brutality. Why would any woman want to be an actor?