Life
The Seagull review: ‘Cate Blanchett gives it pitch–perfect pizzazz’
The star is ceaselessly flamboyant in Thomas Ostermeier’s staging of the Chekhov comedy
March 15, 2025 20:27
The star is ceaselessly flamboyant in Thomas Ostermeier’s staging of the Chekhov comedy
March 15, 2025 20:27I was lucky enough to live next door to a wonderful artist for the last ten years of her life before she died at 94. Tall, willowy and refined Dorothy could have been a member of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group. Vita Sackville-East we called her, because of our east London addresses and because she rather looked like Woolf’s lover.
She was a voracious reader of Russian literature, especially Chekhov’s short stories. However, when it came to directors imposing a modern vision on a classic text she was witheringly sceptical.
“Have they dickered with it?” she would ask when she knew I’d seen a Chekhov play. If we had been talking after I had seen this one which is “conceived and directed” by the German director Thomas Ostermeier and stars Cate Blanchett, my answer would have been “to within an inch of its life.”
But for a towering thicket of wheat at its centre, the Barbican’s hanger-sized stage is dominated by an oblivion of white that embraces (or traps) all who exist in it
But for a towering thicket of wheat at its centre, the Barbican’s hanger-sized stage is dominated by an oblivion of white that embraces (or traps) all who exist in it. Only Blanchett’s ceaselessly performative star actor Irina Arkadina has the power to leave and go as she pleases. This is not even true of her visiting lover, the famous author Trigorin (a bearded Tom Burke who looks like Chekhov himself) who falls for Emma Corrin’s rejected scion of the neighbouring estate, Nina. Only the excellent Tanya Reynolds as the tragically self-aware Masha, who is famously “in mourning for her life”, could have stepped out of any classic Chekhov production of the last 30 years.
Ostermeier’s and Duncan Macmillan’s translation of the 1895 work is set very much today. The evening opens like a gig with Zachary Hart’s Medvedenko playing Billy Bragg on an electric guitar. And the early (usually opening) scene in which Konstantin gathers his family on the shore of their estate’s lake to watch his antidote to “safe” theatre sees everyone donning VR headsets.
Konstantin’s speech declaring his contempt for theatrical convention and all who watch it is accompanied by very funny apologetic glances to the audience from Jason Watkins’s Sorin. But it is also licence for Ostermeier to pack the evening with present day references just as he did with his production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People starring Matt Smith.
As with that show, which I liked more than most, what could have been – and to purists probably is – a dog’s dinner in desperate search of modern relevance feels like an urgent reflection of our world today. When Trigorin despairs at its current state his mention of Zelensky as a figure of hope triggers spontaneous applause.
Despite all this the tragically unrequited love that drives Chekhov’s comedy survives. Blanchett is ceaselessly flamboyant as the selfish Irina, ceding all empathy to Corrin’s tormented Nina, the kind of performance that with or without dickering every production of Chekhov needs to make it worthwhile.
The Seagull
The Barbican
★★★★