Nina review: auditions from hell for Chekhov's Seagull at Battersea

A production built around auditions for Chekhov's Nina has opened at Battersea Arts Centre in London, and it stages the audition itself as a site of menace. Nina, directed by Caroline Williams, puts women in a room with a director who needles them, dismisses them and films them, and asks the audience to watch.

The premise is simple. Women audition for the role of Nina, the aspiring actor in The Seagull, in an experimental production run by Goran, a director the review describes as a "sombrely pretentious wunderkind", played with a brooding presence by Rowan Polonski. Goran uses live-feed cameras in his show. He is, the review notes, the type of director who dismisses the need for an intimacy coordinator while claiming credit for having one in the room.

The rules the women follow are never spoken. "Smile. Introduce yourself. Say you're such a big fan. Now do whatever he tells you." That sequence, laid out in the Guardian's review, is the engine of the show: compliance performed under pressure, again and again.

Williams' production is described as "discomforting, rage-fuelled", a show about men and power — and, unexpectedly, about rotting winged roadkill. The review calls the result "a riveting series of horribly invasive auditions" and a "tense show".

What does this change for the viewer?

For audiences, the question is whether a show about the abuse of casting-room power can hold attention without collapsing into misery. On this evidence, it can: the review's verdict is that the tension holds, and the discomfort is the point. The caveat — the published review is truncated, and the full text sits behind the Guardian's paywall, so the star rating and the reviewer's final judgement are not visible here.

What is clear from the available text:

• Venue: Battersea Arts Centre, London
• Director: Caroline Williams
• Source text: Chekhov's The Seagull, filtered through the audition for the role of Nina
• Key cast: Rowan Polonski as Goran, the director within the play
• Devices: live-feed cameras; a storyline involving rotting winged roadkill

The pairing is sharp. Chekhov's Nina is a young woman destroyed, in part, by an older man's use of her; Williams relocates that destruction to the contemporary casting room, where the power imbalance is procedural rather than tragic. Polonski's Goran — the director who claims an intimacy coordinator exists while refusing to let one work — is the mechanism that makes the theme legible.

Whether Nina sustains its rage across a full evening is a question the truncated review cannot fully answer. That it opens at a major London venue with a Chekhov text as its blunt instrument already marks it as one to watch this season.