Under Annie Ryan's direction, the performance of Michael West's new version of Anton Chekhov's first major theatrical success starts out as if to satirise theatre itself. By the time it ends, the primary victim is Chekhov's play, stripped of all characterisation, all sense of time or place, all subtlety and nuance, and all sense of purpose. This is a production which robs the word travesty of any meaning.

If the director or the author wished to satirise Chekhov, they needed, first of all, to understand what he was on about, but there is no evidence of that understanding. The satire (if that was what was intended) fades quickly into a series of cheap tricks, of characters thinned to caricatures, actors with grossly-drawn make-up offering a demonstration of what used to be known as coarse acting, and still no sense of purpose unless it be an undergraduate and ill-informed attempt to play The Seagull as if it had been intended to be some kind of melodramatic farce.

Occasionally some of Chekhov's words swell up above the pastiche, but the caricatures have no characters with which to sustain them, so they simply fall flatly and dully to remind us of the more effective comedy which the original author had created. In the original, the comedy was vested with a sadness which lent it depth. Here, Constantin Treplev's suicide at the end comes across as a melodramatic gesture by which the young man, who started the evening by wanting to create a new form of theatre, wanted to put an abrupt end to the form of theatre in which this production had landed him. Maybe the hitherto creatively inventive Corn Exchange Theatre, whose presentation this is, had somehow ineffectively satirised itself, but it was hard to find any fun in the joke.

At Project @ The Mint until July 10th. Booking on: 1850 260027

At Tallaght Civic Theatre July 12th to 17th. Booking on: 01-4627477