2 days Ago By Tim Bano
What’s the point of theatre? It’s the question that director Thomas Ostermeier - once the enfant terrible of German theatre, who famously said that directors over 40 should stop working, himself now 56 - reckons with in this roguish, self-referential and spectacular production of Chekhov’s play about theatre. Oh, and it’s got a performance from Cate Blanchett that may well be the best of the year. ‘Who wants a bit of Chekhov?’ Zachary Hart’s dirty-overalled Medvedenko asks as he bashes out a Billy Bragg number on guitar.
Oh god, is this going to be cool Chekhov? Well sort of, but Ostermeier’s also taking the piss. Yes he has actors randomly take to microphones, with some talking directly to the audience, others seemingly unaware we’re there. But with Duncan Macmillan’s new - largely faithful, often very beautiful - adaptation, it becomes a punch up between The Seagull done traditionally and done as contemporary theatre, sliding between the two, unable to settle.
That’s what we get from Magda Willi’s set too: realist and abstract in one, with a thicket of tall wheat stalks in the middle of the stage, where the actors magically appear, surrounded by a curved blank wall. The great Arkadina (Blanchett) is a vain Hollywood actress, Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee) a frustrated nepo baby writer who can’t escape the shadow of his attention-hoovering mother, while Trigorin is a writer who puts himself on the same shelf as Ian McEwan. With great humour but, more importantly, great complexity, Ostermeier lets Chekhov’s long love centipede (Medvedenko loves Masha loves Konstantin loves Nina loves Tregorin etc) play out.
You do wonder which of her Hollywood colleagues Blanchett is channelling here: snippy, haughty, eye-rolling, everything a big gesture, everything a performance. She exudes entitlement, like she’s made the absolute assumption that everyone adores her. Her Arkadina can’t stop acting.
Every line is an aria, a song-and-dance moment. Some speeches burst into song, even tap dance – at one point she does the splits. She’s never able to fully engage with the person she’s talking to because she’s always playing to the gallery.
You keep thinking, as all the characters face their reckoning, that the carapace will crack, but it never does. Even as she begs her lover not to leave her for a 20-year-old girl, it’s still a performance. She strips to her waist, writhes on the floor, cries.
‘You think I’m acting?’ she weeps at Trigorin. Yes, is the answer. It’s an immensely skilled performance from Blanchett, to act acting like that, and to do it in so many different ways.
That couldn’t be more of a contrast to Tom Burke’s initially gnomic Trigorin who, for the first few scenes he’s on stage, manages almost to disappear into himself. Where Blanchett is all about the audience, Burke is turned inward, his words muttery and almost slurred. Frowning and agonising, you’d almost feel pity for him if he didn’t feel it so much for himself.
But everyone here is brilliant, really: from Jason Watkins’s adorable invalid Peter carrying a little cushion with him wherever he goes to Emma Corrin ’s too-trusting, too-sincere Nina. It’s like you can see Ostermeier arguing with himself through these characters about what theatre should be, especially when you’re closer in age to the stuffy older generation depicted in it than the radical younger ones. Amid the self-flagellation of the characters - most of them moan about how miserable they are and how they’ve wasted their life - the play itself self-flagellates: speeches about how theatre is overpriced, indulgent, not relevant to anything in real life.
With lights that barely go down, and actors who seem to be able to see us sitting there, it’s hard not to feel self-conscious as an audience member. Why exactly HAVE we paid all this money to watch a three-hour self-pity party? Is there a point to watching a play about art and love when the world is so horrible? That’s what the production wrestles with, so uncomfortable in its own skin, so unhappy to be doing what it’s doing, but along the way turning itself into an exquisite piece of theatre that becomes the answer to its own questions. The Seagull is at the Barbican until 5 April.
