Review: THE SEAGULL, Starring Cate Blanchett, Barbican Theatre

The approach taken by Duncan MacMillan and Thomas Ostermeier in updating Chekhov’s comic masterpiece of thwarted love and crippling depression is best exemplified in an ear-splitting use of “Golden Brown”. Ah yes, the heroin song - because so many of our benighted house guests are looking for its sweet oblivion. Clever, I thought. But less and less clever on each of its three subsequent reprises… 

This Seagull soars away to over three hours, as there are also some Billy Bragg songs to perforate the fourth wall from the start and later to underline the working class credentials of Simon Medvedenko (Zachary Hart in a mid-90s Birmingham City shirt, with accent to match, but a Cockney singing voice). The greatest writer of subtext is buried under too much text, the great Russian peeking out occasionally from beneath the director’s suffocating concept.

It’s not all bad as we do get the laughs that Chekhov intended (and that he has always got - if you don’t count the famous silence that greeted its premiere - in his homeland) but, unlike the most delicious productions of his work, the comedy does not slide frictionlessly out of the tragedy. Led by a wildly over the top Cate Blanchett, leaning into all the histrionic impulses of the popular actress, Irina Arkadina, the jokes, the clowning and the putdowns come thick and fast. But there’s a relentless quality to them and a jarring when the tone changes - half comic and half tragic instead of fully comic and fully tragic at the same time.  

As her lover, the writer of Jeffrey Archerish novels, Alexander Trigorin, Tom Burke catches both the seductive charm of the pseudo-intellectual and his destructive narcissism, rather better disguised than that of the hideous Arkadina. Both sides of his character are on show in his cruel enticing of Nina Zarechnaya, the ingenue actress too dazzled by Trigorin’s fame to see him for what he is. An elfin Emma Corrin is superb in the role, heartbreaking in the tragic denouement, a damaged soul in a life ruined by her mother and her lover. It is no surprise that the character who shouted least, said the most.

Kodi Smit-McPhee (surprisingly on stage debut) goes full ‘Kevin the Teenager’ as aspirant radical playwright, Konstantin, Irina’s son denouncing everything his mother’s generation of theatremakers hold dear, but the performance is curiously one-pitched. He is stuck in the middle of Russia’s vast miles of nothingness (parallels with Masha in Three Sisters) and he is pathologically jealous of his mother’s new lover (Hamlet this time), but he’s exactly the same person over the two year timeline of the play. 

The biggest laughs are reserved for Jason Watkins’ terrific turn as Peter Sorkin, Irina’s brother and owner of the country retreat, whose pithy barbs are largely directed towards his own self, a man, like Vanya, whose life has happened while he was making other plans. Dying he may be, but you get the feeling he might outlast them all - his type so often do - remaining as bitter as the slick Soviet tea that sluiced out of shiny samovars 40 years ago.

The starry casting has ensured full house notices already for most of the run and I suspect this bold, even brash, production will please far more than it disappoints. But some will look for the subtlety and grace of the greatest playwright of them all and that proves really hard to find outside the handful of monologues that appear like lacunae of cruel calm amidst the querulous chaos.  

Whichever camp you’re in, I suspect it’ll prompt a revisit to more conventional approaches to the fab four plays and that’s no bad thing. As the pointedly blue and yellow deckchairs on stage remind us, Russia is never far away and, if we must have Putin, at least we can have Chekhov too.

The Seagull at Barbican Theatre until 5 April

Photo images: Marc Brenner

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