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In German director Thomas Ostermeier’s engrossing update of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, moody aspiring playwright Konstantin rages against an establishment that won’t appreciate his talents. “Theatre is awful. It’s overpriced, elitist, indulgent, outdated and entirely irrelevant to what’s actually happening in the world,” he complains.
But Ostermeier’s production absolves itself of most of these charges, even though it’s stuffed with enough big names – not least Cate Blanchett as deluded actress Arkadina – to ensure that tickets will only make their way into the hands of a lucky few. It probes the relationship between art, obsession and self-deception, poring over and riffing on its themes like a rock song (“Golden Brown” by The Stranglers patterns through its scenes).
Blanchett’s Arkadina is wonderfully, hilariously crass, blinding the front row with her glittery jeans then nonplussing the whole audience by tapdancing into splits. Yet underneath the performative silliness, Blanchett conveys a sense of a cavernous emptiness – a detachment from her own emotions that means she can only express herself in a hammy karaoke of borrowed lines.
Desperate for attention, she has flattered middlebrow writer Trigorin (an appropriately smug Tom Burke) into loving her. But he’s also obsessed with Nina, an aspiring actor played with remarkable internal depth by Emma Corrin. When he cannibalises her pain and turns it into an idea for a trite story, she sees through him enough to slap him, but not enough to drag herself out of his narcissistic orbit. Meanwhile, Kodi Smit-McPhee’s lanky, introverted Konstantin is captivated by Nina too and is oblivious to the hurt that causes to his put-upon admirer Masha (a refreshingly spiky Tanya Reynolds). No amount of vape-smoking aloofness can protect her from heartbreak.
Ostermeier’s production is full of devices that could feel gimmicky if they didn’t clearly come from an intimate understanding of Chekhov’s play. Its opening scenes are set on a lake’s edge, so Magda Willi’s set design makes a clump of gigantic reeds sprout from the stage, with characters pushing their way through them to crash into a scene – or trembling among their leaves in agonies of embarrassment or unrequited love.
There are microphones at the front of the stage, a modish device that makes sense here because it lets actors send their innermost thoughts or heightened emotions echoing into the audience. And down-to-earth Simon (Zachary Hart) punctuates the action with Billy Bragg folk songs, their plangent authenticity clashing satisfyingly with all the fakeness and self-delusion on display here.
Still, although Chekhov’s spirit saturates this production, we’re definitely not in Russia. Ostermeier and playwright Duncan Macmillan’s perfectly pitched adaptation is laced with witty notes of Anglicisation (when Nina’s acting career is going badly, she’s stuck doing a regional panto) and smart nods to the tensions within the UK’s theatre scene. The first few acts sing, powered by these characters’ ravening, punchily expressed hunger for fame, love and meaning. But when disillusionment sets in, the play loses momentum, sagging until it reaches its jarring climax.
Perhaps that’s because Smit-McPhee’s understated Konstantin struggles to hold our attention as his desperation mounts – or perhaps that’s because Ostermeier’s three-hour production luxuriates in a play he clearly loves. Where Jamie Lloyd’s acclaimed 2022 The Seagull was an exercise in punchy concision, this staging is languid and thoughtful, sucking you into the self-fixated inner worlds of these awful, fascinating people.
‘The Seagull’ is at the Barbican until 5 April
