Q.: Is there grief in your character, Arkadina?
Muriel Santa Ana: Sure. All characters are like us, unfinished, imperfect, in process. They try to hold on to the last rales of something; especially those who are over 40 years old, who are facing those who are young. In my extensive preparation of the character I was incorporating things from other authors, as concepts of Irène Némirovsky about age. Remember that, at that time, a 46 -year -old person was already considered an old woman.
Q.: And Chekhov died at 44.
MSA: Exact. That also defines Arkadina, who in addition to being a great theater actress, a diva, represents someone who escapes other rules: participates in the bohemia, has a younger lover than her, and precisely that relationship with Trigorin allows her, as we would say today, a certain flexibility, because after Trigorin escapes with a girl, the young woman returns to Arkadina and she accepts it. Somehow, Arkadina is the architect of the destruction of Nina, that return of Trigorin is a triumphal return. Arkadina never doubts the link with her lover, she uses him to fulfill his ends. That is why we return to before: the work is a permanent tension between people who are finishing their life cycle and people who fight to have a place, where several remain on the road, or die.
Q.: Is Arkadina victimize or victim?
M. SA: In truth, we do not work with these moral categories. He is a character of enormous complexity. As Rubén once told me in reading: “I know you with her and then act that.” Arkadina is a kind of holy grail for the actresses of fortypico. They have done all the big ones. It is like a mystery, that mystery of which it is sometimes preferable not to speak but act. She is an independent woman, she has money but she has earned it, she didn’t inherit it. He is also independent of the penalty, of love, of pain.
Q.: The clash with Kostia, the son, is tremendous.
R.S.: There are several strong clashes, but I return to my theory. All the characters in the play are sorry. They are painful characters making a comedy. No one can be happy fully. Arkadina has a huge grain that is her son. She can be successful but gets wrong with her son.
MSA: I think she loves him, but what she doesn’t support is her mother’s role. And Kostia is a young man who wants to write, who does not support the ideas about the theater that his mother represents, he fights for another ideology. For Arkadina, in addition, his son represents the passage of time.
RS: In addition she does not read it. Her son becomes a moderately recognized writer, but she never reads it. She recovers her lover but loses her son. The only character that does not happen to that is the doctor, who is the one who represents Chekhov. He is the one who looks at everyone, puts distance, reflects. The only one who does not suffer.
MSA: It is the only one that allows cynical comments, the one with the most humor. It’s Chejov watching his characters.
Q.: It means that “La Gaviota” is something like that meta-metha-theater. A work on actors observed by an author.
RS: Exactly. There are many moments in abyss. The doctor looks at everything from the outside, is a visitor. It is also the one that protects Arkadina in the most difficult moments, such as the end, when what happens with her son occurs. It is the only one, also, that this comment is allowed to make in the scene of a violent discussion: “What boring people.” That the pure Chekhovian humor.
Q.: Let’s say something about the eternal problem of Spanish versions of the classics to Spanish. Are the characters about you or you?
RS: Of you, but softened. Avoiding it to the fullest. In my “Hamlet”, for example, we look for ways not to use one way or another. In Shakespeare the “you” cannot be used. And here the same, but we cannot use the “you.”
MSA: I recorded a single “you” that my character says at the end of a long perorata, because there was no other way. S.: We have the advantage that in Chejov the characters are almost always about you, even among direct relatives, but otherwise we avoid how far the use of the second -person pronoun could be used. We have worked deeply the work and its language, and we have separated the way “La Gaviota” is usually seen, as a family drama, or rather, as a dysfunctional family, which is nonsense. And what is extraordinary is the work says by Chekhov: “A work with little action, tons of literature, and a lot of love.” In truth, the discussion between the mother and the son is that the mother is realistic and the symbolist son, Trigorin is a realistic author, but who is neither Tolstoi nor Turguenev. All the time are Turguenev and Maupassant turning.
Treaty of literature
Q.: They are literary conflicts.
RS: So much so that, thanks to Alejandro Ariel González, who translated directly from the Russian and also resorted to Chekhov exegetes texts, we reached incredible clues. For example, it is cited, and without mentioning, the “Bel Ami” of Maupassant. That reinforces what we said before, are literary fights rather than relatives. Arkadina reproaches her son to be unable to write a vaudeville. And he replies “Go to act in those mediocre and unfortunate works.” He does not tell him “Vieja Loca”, he reproaches his literary school. It is a literature treaty, much more than any of Chekhov’s works. Of course, we did not make it evident, we did not put projections with texts, or costumes with texts, nor the characters take soup of letters. But it is remarked to hear that and not a family drama.
Q.: Returning to the generational issue. It occurs to me that in Chekhov there is a kind of inverted “pork war”. They are not the young people who kill the old but the old people to young people.
R. S :: There is a clearly declared fight, and those who end up bad are young.
MSA: Young people are broken. The one who did not kill himself was broken forever. The one that achieves its goal is Nina, which is innocent but has an ambition, a huge audacity. She wants to be a famous actress. It is not fragile, it is targeted by a desire for glory and fame. The first questions he asks Trigorin is what he feels being famous. She leaves everything because of fame, she suffers the rejection of her family, vague in the rain hungry, is damaged forever, but in the end she succeeds, “I am now an actress,” he says.
Q.: Something like “La Malvada”, the film with Bette Davis?
R. S.: No, Nina doesn’t have that strategy. She does not want to replace Arkadina but to reach glory. It is very interesting that there is no confrontation between them, the work says a lot through what it does not say. In a mediocre work, Arkadina would say things how “Oh, don’t talk to me about that!” Not here. Chejov omits it. There are two whole acts in which they don’t even cross, that is typical of a great author.
MSA: The viewer can be waiting for a clash that never happens, and that creates more tension. I studied Arkadina in depth, but once on the scene, I disregard what I learned; I act to an actress, even try to forget that I am an actress. When confronting the other characters, the feeling is very liberating. I am part of a gear, of a system that we have created all together.
DSC_1383.La Gaviota-Chejov-Ruben Schumacher-CTBA2025- Photo Carlos Furman
Modernity
Q.: How did he get to “La Gaviota”?
R.S.: It is a very represented work, and I wondered why I also wanted to do it. First, because I wanted to work with Muriel for a long time, and make a Chekhov, but also because it is a work that requires assuming the problems it brings. Temporary location, for example. We did, as I said, a small time shift, but it is a very dated work. If one “aggiorna”, all the discussion about horses, for example, becomes bad theater. Are we going to replace that discussion with a cell phone? It is absurd. If “the seagull” retains its strength, and becomes contemporary, it is for that time and that violence it has.
Q.: It would denaturalize.
RS: As is. There is a very wrong idea that some artists have who believe that because Aggiornan becomes closer. They assume that they speak to a spectator who does not know history, who is not accustomed to watching movies that happen in Beijing or in the fourteenth century. They believe that the public only understands what it has next to it, but although it does not have a great cultural level it has great information. You can see a work that takes place on a Russian farm at the beginning of the 20th century and feel excited. He does not need Arkadina to enter jeans and shoes, how the older actresses are dressed, which makes me sick. For a work to work, it has to be consistent with the cultural system of the time in which it was conceived and not when it is received. That is why I think it is for all spectators, not for “the Chejov circle.” In that lies the greatness of the classics: Chekhov was able to speak to their contemporaries and project about future times. And so modern is “La Gaviota” that the final closes by knife, that is, with a blackout. There are no moralizing phrases or the curtain falls. That end must have been very disturbing in his time, perhaps that is why his first representation did not succeed.
Q.: How is space raised?
RS: It is very abstract, nothing realistic, stripped. There is an entire act that is only a landscape, a bank and a chair.
MSA (laughs): And the actors have nowhere to grab.
RS.: Once one tried to lean on a chair and my cry was heard, you don’t support yourself!
MSA: Sometimes I feel a certain emptiness, a certain vertigo, but it is an important experience to be in such a space, without support elements. You have to give rise to the new, although Abisme.
RS: There is a very elaborate treatment of the costumes, space is subtraction. Non -minimalist but subtraction, the props is only essential. The same goes for music and sound effects, everything points to that.
Q.: The young cast arose from a casting.
MSA: That’s right, Rubén invited me to participate in the auditions. An open call was made in which more than 500 applicants were presented, of which were 32 who participated in the workshop that Rubén gave for 6 days, and from there the actors emerged.
RS: Young actors, young bodies were necessary. It is an absurd, as it is almost always done, hiring for those papers actors that simulate being young. The actor who makes Kostia is 23 years old, including two years less than Chekhov’s character.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
