'The Seagull' review — Cate Blanchett leads a magnificent revival that captures the humour, intellect and tender heart of Chekhov

Read our review of The Seagull, starring Cate Blanchett, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Emma Corrin and Tom Burke, now in performances at the Barbican to 5 April.

How do you feel about those trendy contemporary updates of classic plays with their fourth wall breaking, modern tech, rock music, and splashy star casting? That’s the salient question asked by Thomas Ostermeier’s terrifically engaging revival of Chekhov’s The Seagull, majestically led by Cate Blanchett, both in terms of its actual form and, more cheekily and very effectively, in direct address from its characters.

This is, after all, a tale dominated by artists: the fading grand dame, aspiring playwright, ambitious ingenue, and successful novelist. Duncan Macmillan’s bitingly witty adaptation (co-written with Ostermeier) tackles that meta strand head on. “Who’s up for a bit of Chekhov?” chirps Medvedenko at the start. Although it’s not quite what we were expecting, he acknowledges, as he gets out an electric guitar and bursts into Billy Bragg.

The sharp updates continue. The commercially minded Triogorin’s work is dismissed by Konstantin as “airport books”, and, raging against the establishment, he takes potshots at the constant staging of the same old plays, sniping that there should be no more cultural funding for anyone over the age of 40. His own would-be revolutionary dramatic effort features VR headsets and wirework: his mother dismisses it, cruelly but accurately, as a knock-off, semi-immersive Cirque du Soleil.

Ostermeier, in contrast, harnesses all those tropes expertly to not just engage with theatre, but to beautifully illuminate this group of lost souls. Though Blanchett’s Arkadina scoffs at microphones, they’re used with great purpose here: characters who otherwise self-delude voice their scariest honest thoughts into them, confessing straight to us, but Arkadina, the person with the most highly developed public shell, resists that initially and instead performs to the audience. Her role is the carefree star actress who will never age: see how she tap dances, dons sparkly jeans, sings, even does the splits!

Blanchett is fabulously entertaining as this self-involved, limelight-hogging, needily territorial diva (Ostermeier winks at her real-life overpowering A-lister status). But the shattering moment comes when she fights against another, unwelcome role, that of the rejected woman begging her lover not to leave her for a younger model. Blanchett breaks out of the “scene”, her whole performance shifting to raw, vulnerable and softly naturalistic. It’s naked emotion, startling amid the studied artifice, and it is electrifying.

But, magnetic though Blanchett is, this is a unified ensemble effort. Tom Burke is tremendous as a compulsively vampiric writer whose detachment, which initially seems amusingly eccentric, is revealed to be chillingly sociopathic. Wonderful too are Emma Corrin as the hungry, intelligent but too-breakable Nina, Tanya Reynolds’s deadpan depressive Masha, glued to her vape, and, in a notable stage debut, Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Konstantin: furious adolescent angst personified. I’ve never before felt so viscerally that he and Arkadina pose a vicious existential threat to one another.

Yet the quiet soul of the whole piece is Jason Watkins as Peter Sorin, the civil servant who fears he was irrelevant in life, and is now drifting towards an equally ignominious death. It’s his story that forms the bedrock of a production in which the countryside reads explicitly as a kind of spiritual limbo: when characters enter Magda Willi’s sky-high thicket of reeds, they vanish from our plane.

It’s such a rich reading of the play, deftly switching gear from caustic humour – this is, hands down, the funniest Seagull I’ve ever seen – to philosophical exploration of generational tension, financial hardship, social change, gendered double standards around ageing, and whether art can make a difference in a troubled world: is it an escape or a reckoning?

But it’s the tenderness that strikes you most, especially in the compassionate second half. Can we ever understand our human behaviour – and, even if we do, can we really change it? It’s Masha’s words that keep haunting me: “If you can fall in love, you can climb back out of it.” If only the head could so easily overrule the heart. Magnificent theatre.

The Seagull is at the Barbican to 5 April. Book The Seagull tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Seagull (Photos by Marc Brenner)