This Seagull is birdbrained

That often visionary director Katie Mitchell and playwright Martin Crimp have formed a partnership remarkable for arrogance and perversity.

Mitchell has directed Crimp's cut or rather truncated, maimed and technically inept version of Chekhov's early masterpiece, with its frustrated lovers and dreamy narcissists.

Mitchell's production is set in a vast, peeling, grey room, as if to remind us the landed gentry are down and going. It is bathed in an almost perpetual twilight that prevents you from seeing facial expressions.

The action often remains cramped in the stage's righthand corner, with a wall stopping one audience section from seeing and sometimes hearing.

The actors suffer, thanks to the confused, misplaced perspectives. Juliet Stevenson's mildly amusing Arkadina, that once-famous actress, whose career is left dangling at the end of second-string touring dates, scales the heights of egotistical petulance as she flatters Mark Bazeley's unduly boring Trigorin into sexual submission. Sadly Miss Stevenson never suggests there may be more to Arkadina than shallowness.

As her loveless, emotionally disturbed son, Ben Whishaw makes a wilfully cool and composed Konstantin. Perhaps the fact that Crimp has cut his role down to raw basics explains why Whishaw expresses such muted grief or suicidal despair. He no more matures or changes than does Hattie Morahan's dazzled but insufficiently harrowed Nina. Only Arkadina's decrepit brother, Gawn Grainger's Sorin, rings the bell of Chekhovian conviction.

Anyone who comes fresh to the play should be warned they are not seeing some radical reinterpretation, but a pallid version of the real thing.

Following in the footsteps of such famous translator/ adaptors as Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, Martin Crimp announces he has "stripped away" Chekhov's exposition, asides and soliloquies to make The Seagull "fully connect with contemporary audiences".

Yet before all this Crimpage, this textual stripping or vandalising of Chekhov, audiences managed to enjoy and understand The Seagull in its fully dressed, Chekhovian state. Crimp's version opts for a simplifying, modernising baldness. The National is not hugely subsidised by the state to go in for dumbing-down exercises.

It partly exists to help us understand theatre classics and the history of the stage's changes and developments, not to smooth over and disguise the past as if it were some boring aberration that needs jazzing down for today's theatrical air-heads.