Pan Pan Theatre
The Seagull and Other Birds
Pan Pan Theatre
The Seagull and Other Birds
What would The Seagull look like – if it weren’t The Seagull? At Backa Teater, constantly provocative theatre company Pan Pan has created sort a rollercoaster like remix of this classic play.
At Backa Teater, Irish theatre company Pan Pan Theatre tackles Anton Tjechov’s popular classic The Seagull from the end of the 1800’s. With the ambition to create something new out of the play, Pan Pan Theatre has asked a number of playwrights to write new, contemporary texts using The Seagull as their point of origin. An experiment totally in line with Tjechov’s own philosophy of challenging existing theatre conventions.
These new texts have been put together to form a strange, funny and captivating play – about a play. In the original play The Seagull, the main characters tackle the big questions in life, while at the same time being part of a love carousel – every one loves someone they can’t have. Also in The Seagull and Other Birds we find texts that tackle’s connections and contradictions between art, love and our modern age.
Enjoy Tjechov to the sound of The Boomtown Rats’ hit I Don’t Like Mondays and let yourself be absorbed by phenomenal acting in small chamber plays where YouTube meets classical ballet, meta theatre and nonsense. The performance also contains a number of TV references – for example there is a scene from the popular TV-series Girls, but it is the characters from The Seagull that deliver the lines. The result is a playful, uncompromising and charming performance, with a great deal of love for theatre.
Pan Pan is the oldest contemporary theatre company on Ireland. Since they started in 1991, founder Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn has been constantly questioning their own work, refusing to venture into safe territory. Their idea, and the reason they exist, is to develop new ideas in theatre – they want to explore, twist and turn the art form with all its difficulties and possibilities.
All the works that Pan Pan present are hailed as being truly original – whether they write their own script or if they create something that is a unique expression of an already established work, as in the case with The Seagull.
This is theatre at its most vibrant and entertaining. In a review of the piece, the New York Times wrote: ”This production is probably the company’s most straightforward ode to theater’s limits and infinite potential, its frustrations and consolations” and Sunday Independent wrote: “Magnificently stimulating and thought-provoking theatre in an equally devastating setting. Not to be missed”.
Cast: Andrew Bennett, Una McKevitt, Gina Moxley, Daniel Reardon, Judith Roddy & Dick Walsh
Director: Gavin Quinn
Design: Aedín Cosgrove
Directors assistant: Maeve Stone
Costume: Grace O’Hara
Stage master: Tríona Humphries
Production manager: Rob Usher
Producer: Aoife White
Video & photo: Ros Kavanagh
Social media manager: Noelia Ruiz
With support from Culture Ireland as part of Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme.