A patch of long, green corn as high as an elephant’s eye in the middle of a wide bare stage against a curved, white, reflective back, two old plastic garden chairs, birdsong (Magda Willi set designer, Tom Gibbons sound, Bruno Poet lighting)—we could be in a Pina Bausch production. Simon Medvedenko (Brummie-accented Zachary Hart), now a factory worker not a schoolteacher, comes riding by on his quad bike. First laugh. His “life’s awful” gets another laugh. He’s a natural.
He fancies himself as a bit of a Billy Bragg or maybe a Pete Townsend on his electric guitar, which opens every act. He ad libs, talks to us (”how you doing?”), the audience loves it. All the actors ‘ad lib’ —that's what those microphones are for—asides, soliloquies, raised dialogue... All very knowing, self-referential and very meta: Cate Blanchett, as famous actress Arkadina, says she’s never done banal theatre… and worries about a cold sore…
The fourth wall is breeched immediately. It’s stand-up. Well, Chekhov said it was a comedy, so comedy it must be. Adapters (no translator credited) Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier (also director) have turned his comédie humaine into vaudevillian black farce. The actors keep their own accents for an echt effect. Real people, you see, but where’s the poignancy?
Based on people in his milieu (and Hamlet), Chekhov is timeless and his characters universal. Is their version a brutal pastiche of our times? Are Macmillan and Ostermeier taking the piss (lots of modern vernacular, especially from Masha) out of theatre, its performers, its practitioners, themselves? And the audience—lights come up for interactive possibilities—for paying extortionate prices to see this…
It’s about now: dress is now, mobile phones, an airport cart (another visual joke), Masha (Tanya Reynolds) is vaping, and Konstantin’s play is played out on virtual reality headsets—his mother, Arkadina, can’t quite get the hang of hers. Nina flies up like a bird on a wire.
There is no subtext. No subtlety. All is out in the open. And that patch is perfect for illicit affairs and entrances and exits. Creepy obstetrician Dorn (Paul Bazely) comes out of the long grass pulling up his trousers—followed by Polina (Priyanga Burford). He won’t commit, she’s desperate to leave her grumpy husband Ilya Shamrayev (Paul Higgins). Everyone loves the wrong people—a chain of unrequited love, self-love and selfishness.
Is Sorin, Arkadina’s brother, on whose estate this is playing out, the only good person together with the stifled Konstantin? As played, sympathetically and comically (his aimless walk across the stage with a complicit glance at us is pure Max Wall), by Jason Watkin, he could be the reproach but he has his own unfulfilled ambitions. Time is the main character if only they knew it.
They are all unfulfilled in one way or another. Even preening celebrity Arkadina (and does Blanchett ham that up—she looks to be having fun) as she clings to her younger lover, writer Trigorin, whom Tom Burke plays as a mumbling, self-absorbed narcissist. Music plays over his boring talk with Nina—as at the Oscars. So many little digs and references, I glaze over: ‘same old’ as someone says. It’s all same old, even the iconoclastic.
No wonder Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee) blows his brains out. Who wouldn't amongst that lot, holed up in the country with nowhere to go? Is he the innocent seagull? It’s not Nina (Emma Corrin), though she fancies this for a while. She moves on after her affair with the shit Trigorin, after the loss of her baby, though she still loves the bastard. She is a mediocre actress, but she’s still working, off to play in panto at the end of the play.
Have Macmillan and Ostermeier turned Chekhov’s sensitive Seagull into a panto? Life’s a panto or cabaret, my friends… Blanchett sings, tap dances and does the splits, just to prove to Masha that she’s ‘younger’ than her. She’s a cool chick in purple jumpsuit, biker leather jacket, and shades—later in silver glitter trousers. Seducing Trigorin, she has red bikini pants over the top of them. So banal.
A short catwalk three rows into the stalls gives them all a chance to preen like rock stars. There’s a self-serving speech about the need for change—Zelensky is mentioned. The script may need to be updated, though the run is only six weeks. Events can move very fast. Poor Sorin is on life support at the end. They play bingo just before the end, Masha calling out the numbers—now that’s a metaphor.
Chekhov is always up for grabs. I saw a crazy Russian production, in 2021, in which the set was torn down, the director fancying himself as a punk rocker, invading his own creation. Simon Stephens did an update, very like tonight’s version, with his Seagull in 2017 (Higgins was in that, too), which I warmed to more than this alienating Brechtian production, which panders to today’s tropes and jokes. But it’s one we deserve. Three hours become three and a half on press night. A standing ovation seems to be de rigueur these days.