Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia

Featured Image: The Seagull by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre (Veles). Cast: Slavica Manaskova, Simona Dimkovska, Sandra Tancheva, Janka Lefkova, Jordan Vitanov, Faik Mefailoski, Isidor Jovanovski, Blagojcho Stojanov, Filip Hristovski, and Kire Acevski. Photo: Krste Shupev

At a time when theatre often seeks effect, publicity, and visual explosion, The Seagull, directed by Aleksandar Ivanovski, chooses silence as its most powerful instrument. His direction is at once quiet and resolute—it does not shout or demonstrate, but whispers, allowing pauses to speak. Ivanovski seeks neither literalism and naturalism, nor does he fully enter the realm of the conventional; his world exists in a peculiar in-between zone, where the inner, the lived experience, is more real than the external.

From the very first moments, Ivanovski introduces the audience to the lives of the characters—the action unfolds quietly and unobtrusively, even before the spectators have taken their seats. One has the sense of joining a group of people who have already forged strong bonds among themselves, in the midst of an ongoing life entangled in the complex threads of fate, whose story will unfold regardless of our presence.

This sense of a living, continuous action is reinforced by the stage environment created by Filip Korunovski. It underscores the central duality of the production—its concreteness and symbolism, materiality and poetry. The green hills across which the actors move reflect both a natural landscape and the inner world of the characters—soft, vulnerable, and unstable. A stream runs across the entire length of the stage, cutting through and dividing it, transforming the space into a living organism. Water becomes a place of encounters, a reflection of the inner world, and a mirror of the invisible movements of the soul. These choices highlight the delicate balance between naturalism and poetic sign—between the visible and the invisible, the concrete and the symbolic. It is here that Trigorin, getting into the river to catch fish, seeks solace in a simple act of everyday leasure. And in the last scene, the rain delivers its final line: it washes away and consumes human passions and drama, bringing both comfort and destruction. It is a kind of catharsis that does not liberate, but affirms the inevitability of the end—the end of Konstantin Treplev and of his attempt to save himself through art.

The multimedia projection subtly underlines the metaphorical line of the performance—from sunset to rain. At the beginning, the soft golden light of sunset illuminates the stage like a promise, a fragile hope that life and art might merge in harmony. Gradually, the colors deepen; blue and gray begin to dominate, and the landscape sinks into darkness—as if nature itself shares the human inability to hold on to the light. In this transition from warmth to cold, from day to night, the multimedia does not merely illustrate but experiences the fading—of the day, of dreams, of Konstantin Treplev.

This transformation is echoed in the stage space itself. The platform, initially a veranda, gradually changes its function—from an element separating the natural landscape from the material world, it becomes Sorin’s house. This transformation is not only spatial but semantic: the platform becomes a point of observation from which the characters contemplate the world, the rain, and the intimate experiences of the couples by the water. In the final scenes, this space is no longer merely a site of action, but an image of contemplation—of theatre observing life without being able to change it.

The space also functions as a boundary between “inside” and “outside.” Some characters are admitted into the warmth of the home and the community; others remain at the edge—physically and emotionally. In moments of rain and storm, this division becomes even more tangible: vulnerability is experienced differently depending on whether one has a place to retreat to. Medvedenko, Yevgeny Dorn, Konstantin, and Nina often find themselves at the periphery of the space, while other characters inhabit the interior world of the home.

Ivanovski’s musical choice—the song Alone With My Thoughts by Norah Jones—is not merely a background element but part of the dramaturgy of the performance. Its subdued, airy melody resonates with the inner world of the characters and underscores the striving toward the poetry of silence. The music does not express a specific emotion, but rather a state—that intermediate space between thought and feeling in which Chekhov’s characters live.

It carries both distance and tenderness—the same sensation that permeates the performance: love that never arrives, words that fail to find their way, closeness that remains only in thought. Jones’s voice sounds like an echo of the inner monologues—the ones the characters never utter. The song transforms their solitude into a soundscape—a quiet prayer toward the other whom they fail to truly encounter. The soft pulse of the music integrates organically into scenes where nature and the human merge—water, sunset, rain. It gives the performance a rhythm of breathing, not of action; a rhythm that emphasizes vulnerability. When it sounds, the spectator does not simply hear music, but becomes “alone with their thoughts”—in the same emotional isolation in which the characters exist. Ivanovski also uses it as a final touch to his idea of human alienation—not tragic, but fragile, almost beautiful in its doomed nature.

Within this visual score, theatre unfolds not only through words—though at first glance it may seem so—but through images, sounds, movements, and silences. The performance does not tell a story of passions, but of unsharedness—of feelings, ideals, and the striving for art and understanding. Here, even the seagull killed by Konstantin Treplev does not appear literally on stage; it is presented as a gift, as a sign that provokes the imagination and the inner world of the characters. This symbolic approach to the material and immaterial manifests most clearly in the dynamics between the characters.

Arkadina (Slavica Manaskova) dominates Trigorin (Isidor Jovanoski) with the confidence of a mature woman who knows the world and can manipulate its moods. At certain moments, however, Manaskova’s expressive nervousness—shouts and sharper emotional outbursts—slightly disrupts the balance of the stage partnership. In contrast, Nina Zarechnaya (Sandra Tancheva) approaches Trigorin with reverent tenderness—innocent, naive, deeply emotional, like someone just discovering the world. Between these two poles stands Treplev (Filip Hristovski), whose portrayal of the young artist is built on a struggle not with others, but with existence itself—with the need to be heard and understood.

In the scenes following the time jump, Konstantin Treplev’s physical transformation is particularly striking. Having gained weight and enclosed within his body, he bears the marks of the years the action skips over. This external change becomes a sign of lived depression and the burden of unfulfilled aspirations. Particularly dense is the portrayal of Masha—a character constructed as a painfully precise portrait of unrequited love. Initially coarse and cynical, she gradually reveals her deep despair. Her constant drinking and smoking become attempts at solace—vices that temporarily dull the pain of her impossible love for Treplev. In her figure, one can easily recognize the universal image of a person whom love does not choose.

Especially impressive is Faik Mefailoski as Semyon Medvedenko—a character who, in Ivanovski’s reading, becomes a key to the overall poetics of the production. Although, by the logic of Chekhov’s play, the center of the childlike and the poetic belongs to Nina Zarechnaya, Mefailoski’s performance unexpectedly places Medvedenko in that position, turning him into a bearer of these ideas. From openly in love and childishly naive, he gradually reaches the rage of a man who has realized his own invisibility. Through him, the director introduces the motif of the childlike and the poetic inevitably colliding with the weight of reality. Within the ensemble, Mefailoski manages to “play” in the precise tonality of the performance—without external effect, but with inner density.

The final scene between Medvedenko and Masha is particularly powerful. Here, the character steps out of the image of a quiet and good-natured man—the accumulated sense of rejection finally overflows. In this moment, the actor reveals the painful side of the character: a man who has lost faith in love. Gradually, the performance begins to develop one of Chekhov’s most painful themes—love as a force that does not save, but destroys. It transforms the characters in different ways: Medvedenko as a personality, Treplev internally, Nina psychologically. Love here is not solace, but a process of disintegration—quiet, prolonged, and inevitable.

The Seagull by Aleksandar Ivanovski is neither a modern provocation nor a museum reconstruction, but a contemporary reading through the sensibility of silence. Chekhov does not sound outdated, because lack of closeness and shared emotions, common misunderstandings and loneliness have always been part of life.

In the end, beneath the falling rain, Treplev lies dead in the water, the lights fade, and the final refrain of Norah Jones does not mark the end of the story, but the beginning of that silence which continues in life—a silence of unspoken feelings.