While Anton Chekhov always thought of The Seagull as a comedy, that fact has frequently been forgotten through productions that fall into the soporific trap set by angsty, moping, lovelorn characters losing their hearts and minds in the Russian countryside.
There’s no such danger with Thomas Ostermeier, who once declared that he wanted to bring “some rock ‘n’ roll” to Ibsen (his Enemy of the People had the protagonist play Bowie covers in a band and open a political discussion with the audience). The firebrand German director now blasts the cobwebs off Chekhov with boisterous, dazzling delight.
But as irreverent as Ostermeier may seem — as self-referential, ironic, meta, playful — he’s true to his material. The reality of The Seagull is that it treads that fine line between comedy and tragedy. And while this production is an incredible blast, teetering on farce, Ostermeier and co-adaptor Duncan Macmillan (People, Places & Things) actually ramp up the duality. We laugh at this doom-laden bunch because they’re unable to laugh at themselves; but their communal descent into misery is keenly felt.
The Barbican’s broad stage is virtually empty, except for a large cluster of reeds in the center, which allows for amusing entrances and exits throughout the performance. Behind it, a curving opaque wall, in front, a ramp that extends into the first rows of the audience, garden chairs, a couple of mike stands. Birdsong fills the auditorium, before the first actor, Zachary Hart, makes a very un-Chekhovian entrance — driving a dune buggy and carrying an electric guitar.
“I know, it’s nothing you expected,” he jokes, directly to the audience. “Who’s up for a bit of tempo?” He breaks into a rendition of Billy Bragg’s “The Milkman of Human Kindness.” And then a figure bursts through the foliage, puffing on a vape. This is Masha (Tanya Reynolds), declaring, “I’m in mourning for my life.” Hart’s Simon Medvedenko replies that he would “walk for an hour to bask in your indifference.” And Chekhov starts to assert himself.
That pair are two of many on an ill-fated romantic merry-go-round. Simon, a factory worker, is in love with Masha, daughter of this country estate’s manager, Shamrayev (Paul Higgins); Masha is in love with Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the nephew of estate owner Sorin (Jason Watkins); Konstantin is besotted with Nina (Emma Corrin), a neighbor, who will fall in love with Trigorin (Tom Burke), a famed writer who arrives with his lover, Konstantin’s mother, the actress Irina Arkadina (Cate Blanchett). Arkadina, of course, is only in love with herself.
On the sidelines, the local doctor, Dorn (Paul Bazely), is conducting an affair with Masha’s mother, Paulina (Priyanga Burford), though his heart’s not really in it. Dorn’s principal role is as a rare character with an ounce of self-awareness, who casts an outsider’s eye on proceedings and a supportive view of young Konstantin’s attempts to become a writer.
While the love interests move the play along, the core dynamic is that of mother and son, as poor Konstantin singularly fails to win Arkadina’s interest or respect for his endeavors.
Before her showboating entrance, others set the scene. Simon, factory worker and Bragg aficionado, makes explicit the class politics and snobbery that bubble beneath the play’s surface. Sorin, terrifically played by Watkins as a pathetic, crumbled imp, presents the countryside as a place where people go to die. Konstantin (Smit-McPhee making an impressive stage debut) condemns his mother as a narcissist who sees him as “an unwelcome reminder of time” and offers a tirade against her theater as lacking relevance and vitality.
The latter is an early wink to the audience. Later, Konstantin will call for an end to cultural funding for anyone over 40, a reference to Ostermeier’s own, controversial comment early in his career that directors should stop working at that same age; he is now over 40. Yet there’s a serious question here, too, raised in the play and heightened in this adaptation, about the relevance and role of art — whether there’s any point at all — when the world is falling apart.
Blanchett’s diva certainly arrives with a bang. Dressed in a lilac jumpsuit, biker jacket and shades, this is a woman desperately not acting her age — strutting in affected, hip-jutting poses, constantly throwing her hair back in slow-motion, at one point breaking into a tap-dance routine that ends in an albeit impressive, yet groan-inducing splits, every painful second simply accentuating Arkadina’s vanity.
It will continue to be a thoroughly enjoyable physical and comic performance. But the fun doesn’t detract from the character’s shallowness (even at her most vulnerable, as Trigorin acknowledges his feelings for Nina, her pleas to him seem scripted, something she’s acted before) or the terrible damage that her lack of care inflicts upon her son.
Konstantin’s famous performance of his symbolist play is given a typically unexpected and hilarious rendering, as the boy furnishes his wary audience with VR headsets and hoists the harnessed Nina into the air as she recites her New Age monologue — only for his mother to bring it all crashing down with her interruptions. (If Blanchett’s performance leaves a desire to see her play Claire Zacahanassian in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, so Corrin’s suggests they’d make a potent Ariel in The Tempest).
Sometimes the use of gimmicks such as these might break the spell of a “classic.” And the sense of period here is decidedly freestyle — the use of Bragg and The Stranglers shout 1980s rather than 1890s, but vapes, cellphones and mention of the cost-of-living crisis bring it bang up to date. Yet, somehow, there’s method to the scattergun madness, which owes much to the accomplished new adaptation — fresh and pointy, but also full of beautifully poignant moments — and an incredible ensemble. There are no weak links here, only actors walking a tonal high wire with equal aplomb.
With his natural hangdog demeanour and wearing a pair of beach shorts, Burke (currently also seen with Blanchett in Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag) persuasively presents Trigorin as a man who has lived too much in his own head. His description of the writer’s life as lonely and obsessive does nothing to dent would-be actor Nina’s naïve desire for fame. Despite their differences, the central scene between them is gorgeously romantic; it’s no wonder they will become lovers, but, equally, that it won’t last.
The self-possession Corrin lends Nina in these early scenes makes her later unraveling all the more sad; as does the anger and righteousness of Smit-McPhee’s Konstantin, before those feelings are outgunned by vulnerability.
Reynolds lends a hardness to Masha, at once bitter and comic, and her leading of a game of bingo at the play’s resolution restores some dark humor just as tragedy is about to strike. Would you like to join, she asks Sorin. “Just let me die.” Even in a small role, as the cuckolded Shamrayev, Higgins milks his moments. His character’s recollections of the shows he’s seen always miss the point: how he laughed at Medea, because the child actors couldn’t stop winking during their death scenes; how the “bravos” at the opera were much better voiced than the performances.
But if Shamrayev is inadvertently debunking art, Ostermeier and Macmillan are doing no such thing. As the mood of the play becomes more somber (complete with darkening sky, thunder, rain and wailing guitar), its purpose becomes clear. Trigorin may bemoan the difficulty in writing “to understand somebody else’s life”, but this is what The Seagull resolutely and honorably seeks to achieve.
Venue: Barbican Theatre, London
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Paul Bazely, Priyanga Burford, Tom Burke, Emma Corrin, Zachary Hart, Paul Higgins, Tanya Reynolds, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jason Watkins
Playwright: Anton Chekhov, adapted by Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier
Director: Thomas Ostermeier
Set designer: Magda Willi
Costume designer: Marg Horwell
Lighting designer: Bruno Poet
Sound designer: Tom Gibbons
Presented by Wessex Grove, Gavin Kalin Productions, in association with the Barbican.