Nina review – a riveting series of horribly invasive auditions for The Seagull
Battersea Arts Centre, London Women up for a role as Chekhov’s aspiring actor navigate their meetings with a needling director in a tense show 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…
Key points
- Caroline Williams' production Nina at Battersea Arts Centre in London depicts women auditioning for the role of Nina in Chekhov's The Seagull.
- Director Goran, played by Rowan Polonski, subjects the auditioning women to increasingly invasive demands.
- The show uses live-feed cameras and blends Chekhov's play with the audition narrative, ending with a power switch the review calls hollow.
A new production titled Nina, written by Caroline Williams, is running at Battersea Arts Centre in London. The show centers on women auditioning for the role of Nina, the aspiring actor in Chekhov's The Seagull, for a production led by director Goran, played by Rowan Polonski.
In the discomforting, rage-fuelled staging, the women take turns meeting Goran, following unspoken rules to smile, introduce themselves and do whatever he tells them. The review describes the production as a tense examination of men and power.
Escalating demands in auditions
Goran's requests to his Ninas, played by Maya Bartley O'Dea, Nina Bowers, Samantha Begeman and Gemma Barnett, grow increasingly invasive. What begins as small, needling questions shifts to commands the review calls so terrible they could crack a person in two, including telling the women to reveal their trauma and show what it looks like.
The women are eager to please and eager to work, while Goran holds the power to make them a star. Writer Tim, played by Joseph Payne, watches as a timid bystander, reading in for Konstantin as Chekhov's play slips in and out of focus and reality.
Why would any woman want to be an actor?
— The Guardian Culture
Power shift and performances
The production, co-directed by Williams and Deborah Pearson, uses live-feed cameras. The review highlights Bowers' harrowing birth scene as splitting open the show's depths of earned fury, and Begeman's distressing masturbation scene, projected loud and large, as almost too hard to watch but something the show demands audiences bear witness to.
The final switch of power is described as an artistic act of wish fulfilment that rings hollow for the world the show has constructed. The review praises the unflinching direction for its bleak brutality and asks why any woman would want to be an actor.
