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Mickey Jo
By all accounts, I think I ought to hate this production. But somehow, every time I felt it slipping away from me, it consistently found a way. Not unlike the actual family of seagulls who laid eggs in the chimney of my childhood home and essentially kept my family under house arrest one summer to keep coming back. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. If I sound quizzical today, it is because really didn't know where I stood with this production. I'm a professional theatre critic here on social media. Today we are going to be talking about the newly opened production of the Seagull, directed by European theatrical heavyweight Thomas Ostermaier. He has forged an illustrious and accomplished theatrical career and he, along with the brilliant playwright Duncan MacMillan, whose work you might know from every brilliant thing or people, places and things, has created a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's the Seagull, one of four Chekhovian plays which is very well known, very well respected and very often produced. To which end? The last time I saw the Seagirl was only a few years ago in the West End at the Harold Pinter Theatre in a startlingly different production to this one by Jamie Lloyd. This production is taking place at the Barbican and has already become a hot ticket, not just because British audiences go nuts for Chekhov, but because it stars among a glittering cast, Cate Blanchett, spoofing her own celebrity to a certain extent as the grandiose and self important actress Irina Arcadena. Blanchett's performance is one of many aspects of this production we will of course be discussing in today's full review. As always, if you have seen this already, if you were lucky enough to get yourselves a ticket, feel free to comment down below with all of your thoughts and feelings. And I'd be particularly curious to know how your feelings evolved as you were watching the play and also thereafter. Because like I said, I really didn't know where I stood with this one, even during the interval, by which point I usually have a pretty strong sense of where we are. And for this one, if you were to ask me how I felt, I would have told you I have no idea yet. I could have loved it, I could have hated it. I had no idea and I was just hopeful that I would find out by the end. It is now the next day and I still have uncertainties about this piece, but I am ready to talk about it. Here is what I Thought of the Seagull. Now, just before we carry on, yes, this is the smallest program I have ever seen. For those of you listening on podcast platforms, it is slightly smaller than my face. And for those of you just hearing my voice, the only other visual I need to make you aware of is that I wrote 12 pages of notes. I don't often write notes. Boy, am I glad I brought a notebook to this one because there was lots to say. But let's begin by talking about the Seagull as a play and also about how this production works. I don't think I was expecting this to be as contemporary a staging as it was, which perhaps was foolish of me, given the players involved creatively. Now, the Seagull takes place at a country estate where Irina Arcadna is visiting with her family and she is the guest of honour alongside her younger boyfriend, the very successful writer Alexander Tregorin. Yes, it is traditionally Boris Tregorin. He is Alexander in this production. Don't ask me why. Irena's son sort of resents the relationship, largely because he also resents Tregorin for his very commercial approach to the world of writing. If it's any consolation, Trigoran also resents himself somewhat and feels an extraordinary amount of imposter syndrome, which is very much an oversimplification of the pathos with which he describes his feelings about his own work and the existential crisis that he is forever enduring, leaving him a slightly challenging personality. But he's in good company because these are all slightly challenged, slightly depressive personalities who all speak with an extraordinary amount of pathos and melancholia. In short, everyone in the countryside is depressed. If you're surprised, you ought not to be. This is Chekhov. If this were any lesser writer, it would be called Navel Gazing. I mean, he spends the whole time talk about the concept of writing and feeling fraudulent and depressed about writing. But that isn't the only source of depression for these characters. For many of them it is because of unrequited love. We are in this love quadrangle, or perhaps it's Pentagonal. There's a lot going on here because Irina's son Constantine, who has written a play, a very abstract and contemporary play by their standard, is blatantly in love with his young muse, the actress who is going to deliver his play, their neighbour Nina. She lives a sheltered life in by her father and stepmother, but longs to be a famous actress, dreams that she has the chance to realize when she encounters Alexandra Tregorin. And there is an immediate connection betwixt the two, despite his relationship with Irina, who can also kind of straightaway tell Constantine's affections for Nina are a huge inconvenience for Masha, who everybody is aware is holding a candle for Constantine. She is the daughter of the workers who work on the estate, a husband and wife. He is a little bit foolish and she is a little bit having an affair with the handsome doctor, who also has an extensive amorous past, including, it seems, with Irina. There is also the young factory worker Simon, who has unreciprocated feelings for Masha, which he makes clear to her. And finally, I believe the company is completed by Peter, Irina's brother, who is also with them in the countryside, who hasn't led an interesting enough life to have feelings for anyone, but who has a demonstrably closer relationship with and a better understanding of Constantine. But the key focus of the play, I suppose, is the overlap between. Between their romantic tensions and their creative ones. To what extent does Constantine resent Trigorin because of their creative differences? And to what extent is it because of the romantic conflict? Now, the interpretation of this production, it seems, is that everyone's unrequited love and the misery of that has driven them to hysteria and mania. Because the first act at least, is hilarious, unexpectedly hilarious. And that is a criticism I have made of previous productions of Chekhov. I was reminded quite quickly of the production of Uncle Vanya I saw at Lincoln center in New York, with again, a star studded cast and a production whose comedy, I thought gave it more of a sitcom feel than anything appropriately Chekovian. But this production and this new adaptation had me questioning who I even am to say what is and what isn't Chekhov. If the audience is laughing hysterically and I'm laughing along with them, then what can be so bad about that? Except I'm still turning over the extent to which I feel a lot of the early laughter kind of endures and sort of steps on the pathos of very loaded and woeful sentiments in the first act. I was wondering when we were going to stop laughing, because by the end of the play it's going to have to have happened at some point. And sure enough, we eventually get to the final few scenes, which are wildly bleak, unrelentingly bleak. It goes from the funniest seagull you've ever seen to among the most depressing. Hence why I characterize it as hysterical and above all else, manic. This production is manic. I'm going to give you a little bit of A taste of why. We begin with Simon driving in on a quad bike across the stage, nodding to the audience, reversing it around, slowly parking in front of the audience, and then saying, I know that's not what you expected. And he's not wrong. When he then asks, who's up for a little bit of Chekhov? I'm taken aback, but I'm also loving it. The answer, after all, is me. I'm up for a little bit of Chekhov. Listen, it's a Thursday night and I'd had a glass of wine. Now, the bizarre nature of this introduction fuels the first few lines of Marcia's character, who is the next to enter through a cornfield. I'll explain the set in just a moment, vaping and holding badminton racquets. As Simon attempts to make flirtatious conversation with her, she, indifferent to his affections, asks, do you think the play will begin soon? Which gets a huge laugh from the audience because it seems like just a very slow false start to the actual play that we are there to see. In fact, this is very much a component of Anton Chekhov's original script, although this is armed with what feels like very deliberate false comedy. The play that she is talking about is the one which Constantine is premiering along with Nina only its version of this play I don't think you have ever seen before, in order to convey to us a modern audience, the extent to which Constantine's play is progressive and abstract and not of the time and sort of bizarre to those watching. It is not only poetic in its dialogue, but it features Nina stood there wearing equipment that will accompany VR headsets which the collected audience are invited to wear. This is part of a tendency of this script to comment on and spoof contemporary theatrical stagings in the world, many of which, when we're talking about the use of cameras, when we're talking about the use of microphones and this technology, are very rooted in European practices, the kind of techniques we see a lot in the work of the likes of Eva Van Hove and Jamie Lloyd when it comes to commercial theatre spaces. And as you may be beginning to deduce, much of the way in which this has been brought to the stage is crushingly contemporary. If you don't like seeing classic plays staged with modern interpretations, this is so very much not for you. But if it's any consolation, Irina, as played by Cate Blanchett, shares your feelings per this script, because she comments on these new theatrical techniques really just being callbacks to things that took place in the 70s. This along with a comment about unexpected sex on washing machines being an indication to us that this is very deliberately set in the present day. Something that we may also have been able to deduce from the quad bike entrance. And the costuming, which is a little bizarre. I can't tell if it's trying to be hyper modern or just strange. But in particular, the way that Emma Corrin is costumed as Nina and the way that Blanchett is costumed are both slightly unusual. Corin's costuming simply looks like sports Direct sponsored rehearsal wear, while Cate Blanchett wears a series of extravagant outfits as Irina. This purple jumpsuit on arrival, a T shirt with her own name, a cross at arena are cardina paired with some rhinestone jeans. She returns at one point wearing bikini bottoms over these. This all is part of a performance which, as I mentioned, spoofs her own celebrity and is perhaps a little disingenuous until later on in the play, but we'll get to that. Now, her feelings about contemporary theatric techniques don't stop her speaking into some of the onstage microphones, which we've already seen used by Masha in order to speak to the audience about her own misery, her own discontent. The implication being that this means of amplifying the words are really just to convey something to us with additional weight. For a long time, it seemed like the microphone was a device of honesty, but if it is, then Irina perverts that when she takes the microphone and delivers an entire speech about how young she looks in comparison to the much younger, younger Marcia because of the way that she dresses and holds herself. This is always a really winning piece of dialogue, because Irina has utter conviction. And we, if we couldn't already, see that she is a little bit ridiculous, because she goes on to say that she could still play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, which she demonstrably couldn't. But the way that it's staged here, with her wielding this microphone and passing it to an objectively miserable Marcia, she looks like a cruel game show host, or like a Jerry Springer or Oprah type. And when she tells her, you're not really depressed, you're just scared, it feels very familiar of the boomer response to, like, Gen Z, mental health. Blanchard also tap dances in this section. She is so brilliantly at odds with everyone else around her, in particular her son, who is framed here as a slightly more flippant version of his usual character. Really, he's an angsty Nepo baby, and he, unsurprisingly, has an entirely different perspective on theatrical importance. And, you know, in response to the idea that we'll always need the classic plays, which gets a huge laugh because we're all there watching the Seagull. He insists that the classics retain no value and that everyone over 40 ought to no longer be a recipient of artistic funding. This feels like one of the many moments when Ostermaier and Duncan macmillan take aim at the current theatrical ecosystem. And that's one of the aspects of this adaptation that I really love. It feels urgent and it feels so of the now, but it also has a perspective. I need, Aunt, to have something to say increasingly, if we're going to do Chekhov once again, not that many years after we last did the Seagirl with Uncle Vanya, in the Rear View Mirror, with the Cherry Orchard, in the Rear View Mirror with Three Sisters. I don't even think in the Rear View Mirror. I think that that's right up alongside us over at the Globe. I think that's currently running. These plays are produced so often, so it feels all the more important to really have something to say. And, boy, does this production. They make that very clear in the first few moments when they acknowledge the cost of living crisis, when the words cost of living feature in this script as Masha is talking about her miserable circumstances. Certainly financial insecurity is a huge factor in the lives of all of these characters, not aided by the presumably wealthier Irina, who every time she is asked for money, falls to the floor in hysterics. Now, there's much else that this play asserts in its first few moments that establishes all of the directions in which we are heading. Nina has a confrontation with Constantine moments before the play is about to be performed. Constantine's play, that is, when she experiences doubt about the work and the truth of it and the fact that it isn't about love. And she says that everything ought to be about love. When Tregoren tells her later he only seems to be able to write about love, we then know by that point that there is a natural magnetism between these two, and they aren't going to be able to escape each other's orbit artistically or, by extension, romantically. There's also a throwaway line about the concept of a book with someone's name on it being proof that they existed. This ties in with all of the very existential conversation that the show's two significant writers have about the act of creation. This alongside a speech which Tregorin makes later about the idea that literature is dead and deserves to be in a current Climate where the political situation is much more important. This speech is shockingly prescient and current. Volodymyr Zelenskyy gets name checked here amongst a list of the people who we actually need in the world right now, rather than writers, rather than playwrights. Now, there was a really staggering moment at this performance where, as the house lights were raised, as he boldly asked the audience, what are we all doing here? Presumably expecting not to get a response, one man in the circ, not too far from me yelled back, dying. Which he sort of responded to. But I am assured that does not happen at every performance. That is not a plant, and that has not happened previously. And these are all of the aspects of this adaptation and of this version of the Seagull that I find to be really compelling and exciting. Let's talk a little bit about the way that this is staged. It's on the vast barbican stage with a semicircular blank back wall. The most central feature of this playing space is an entire cornfield in a small section in the middle, through which most of our characters enter and exit. Almost every character, except for Simon, makes their first entrance via this cornfield. And the effect that it has is, interestingly, the complete opposite of what Jamie Lloyd did. Because in Jamie Lloyd's version of the Seagull with Emilia Clarke and with Indira Varma a few years ago, everyone was sat on stage in a stage that was made to look like a rehearsal room. Everyone was sat on plastic chairs the entire time. Everyone was stuck together, everyone was confined, everyone was eavesdropping and overhearing, and no one could escape each other's company. And there was a beneficial component to that. Here it's the complete opposite, because every arrival feels purposeful. They have to climb up onto the stage and then they have to emerge through this cornfield for Irina to step out and admonish Marcia for not behaving in a way that is more gleeful and youthful as a young woman. It feels very deliberate and it feels like there's more of a cruelty to that. And so every arrival does feel wonderfully deliberate. In a play that can sometimes feel like a little bit of a sprawling mess of comings and goings. There was a lot more purpose here. The problem, I think, on the inverse, is that when someone is away from this vast, vast space, they are gone and they are forgotten about. And we lose Constantine for a troublingly long time, making it harder for us as an audience to reconcile the idea of his growing depression and frustration and anger with the increasingly close relationship of Nina and Trigorin. Because it's not clear to us that he's really witnessing that he is so far away. Because we see the little playing area and then we see so much space to the sides. There's also a Runway coming forwards from it, which is used only on a couple of occasions. Short of a very powerful moment that Cate Blanchett plays in the second act, I don't know how much it really accomplishes that simply being stood downstage center wouldn't. All of the dialogue, all of the action itself is played sat on a handful of mismatched outdoor garden chairs. And it lacks a little something in warmth and intimacy. Towards the end of the first act, there is a very long exchange between Nina and Tregorin. And as a result of a couple of components here, I think think it just struggles to illustrate and illuminate the kindling affection between them. One of these is Tom Burke's delivery as Tregorin. I don't know that I warned to him entirely because he just feels a little too emotionally indifferent. Throughout we see him a man sort of captivated and possessed by a cryptic message that Nina gives him, referencing one of his own books later on. But during their first exchange, if we didn't have the lighting and the staging to tell us that they were falling in love, you wouldn't really, really believe that they were. This happens at one moment as their microphone levels are lowered and music comes up to see them just sort of fading into increasingly comfortable conversation as we're hearing romantic music that then gets brought down. It doesn't signify the end of the scene. It's just sort of a glowing moment as the colors on them get warmer and we hear I believe it's golden brown again. But his spoken delivery also sounds a little bit drunken and not that many of these characters. Aunt most of the time. A quality played best, I think, by Tanya Reynolds as Masha. More on her later. But we also don't really see the innocence and the naivety that I think is important in Nina's character. She scolds him for his outlook, really. I feel we're not necessarily empowered as an audience to believe in this romantic connection that the two of them have that ends up having really big consequences for almost everyone. This meeting is in many ways the fateful turning point of all of these characters lives. And it just doesn't feel loaded whatsoever. There's not a lot of romantic tension here. And it presumably doesn't help that he is also, by description, very emotionally vacant at this point. And because of the scenes which have followed in the mania with which everything has been directed and delivered, the audience laughs at every third line. And there are statements he makes. He talks about reviews of his work previously that now draw huge laughs and might not in different productions. And it means, I think, we're not really paying attention to the sorrow of it all. There's a sweet moment where he falls back into the cornfield and then, I guess, plants a little bit of foliage in his hair so that when he comes back and he's talking to Nina, he's trying to be serious and the audience keeps chuckling and then Nina keeps chuckling at him. He asks why, and then Nina mentions, it feels like a moment that could have happened accidentally. There's something very organic about it. I think it probably is staged by the nature of how they then react to it. It's also kind of utterly distracting from the text. I also think Corinne's Nina is so eclipsed by Blanchett's arena in this production. And I wonder if the Seagull works in the same way. If you at no point think that Nina could rival Irina for that kind of special quality that she innately has and kind of charisma and star power. If you don't see something special in her, there's no sense of momentum about the direction we're all moving in. And this is where different interpretations of the piece can get so interesting, because the Emilia Clarke led production, directed by Jamie Lloyd, as I mentioned before, obviously had a big focus on Nina, and it was a big focus on the triangle with Nina and Constantine and Tregorin. This one feels like it's focusing more acutely on the mother son relationship with Irina and Constantine, and I guess it's evidenced in the star casting in each instance. But this one feels very much more like the story of a narcissistic mother who perhaps has this reluctance to really understand her son. And also theatrically, what they both represent in this clash of different generational perspectives. It's from this relationship that we get one of the most impactful and most striking scenes of the production, which is the big argument between Irina and her son. This is really brilliantly staged, really brilliantly performed. This is, I think, a shining moment for both of them. But it's very telling that Blanchett's Irina feels even more emotionally exposed afterwards when she's having a confrontation with her lover Tregorin about his feelings for Nina, which have been clear to her. We can tell that from the way that she responds. The Moments that she lets down her hair to exercise a little bit more youthfulness and femininity. But this is also an Irina who is a consummate actress and navigates fascinatingly every single moment of the play as if she is giving a performance. There is so much melodrama and hysteria. Even as she is falling to the floor, she's then lifting her head and adjusting a suitcase so that it can be a more comfortable pillow for her. And for so much of the duration of the thing, she is, to this degree, completely disingenuous. It is not a particularly earnest performance. There is not a great deal of humanity to it, so that when that finally does happen, the only thing that she can do to really separate herself from everything that has come before is what they do do, which is to have her stop everything, shut down the play, remove her microphone and suddenly speak with reality and honesty and vulnerability. To go from everyone being a little more naturalistic and her being so contrived to then being the most genuine person on stage is a startling and very successful contrast. Staying with the performances then, I think Emma Corrin does their best work in this really heartbreaking final moments, where we see Nina as hugely changed. And we've by that point already come to find out about what has transpired in the few years since she had last been seen in the narrative. And much of their best work is delivered in monologue here, with Constantine simply reacting in devastation. Now Cody Smit McPhee is making his professional stage debut here as Constantine. There's a lot that I think is really brilliant, particularly his moments of real frustration and resentment. I think he suffers a little bit from the direction of the piece. I think he is absent for such a long time in the first act that we struggle to retain focus of him. But there's also moments of his early dialogue which feel perhaps a little bit too flippant for a character who has such extraordinary and effervescent emotions. For one who gets so quickly enraged by his mother and whose insecurity is so struck by her behaviour that he calls off the entire play. He's always been this wildly dramatic young man who carries around a shotgun and attempts to kill himself multiple times. Jason Watkins, meanwhile, per his typical style, gives us a really heartbreaking, sentimental performance full of delicate humanity. And it's really charmingly funny in the first act as he talks about his many regrets and how much he hates the countryside and the misfortune of his life in the civil service and the things that just happened to him, without him feeling as though he'd really made choices for himself and the dreams which passed him by. And it is he who finally, finally, after all of the laughter, after all of the insincerity, gets us to that necessary place of real sorrow and despair. By the end of the thing, it is quite quietly devastating. Zachary Hart Simon is another one who eventually breaks our hearts, but he's also utterly charming, delivering this dialogue with, like, a Brummy accent, singing Billy Bragg songs, playing the electric guitar, and sacrificing just as much of his dignity as he feels capable of in his unreciprocated love for Masha. This production prompts such interesting questions about love and misery that we have to ask as the audience, and we ask ourselves, is it more miserable? Is it more woeful to be the one whose love is unrequited and who settles for some other contentment? Or to be the one who is settled for, who can be with the one that they long to be, but knows that they can do nothing in and of themselves to abate their misery now as the object of Simon's affections? Marcia Tanya Reynolds might even be the MVP of this production. For me, I thought this was a staggeringly brilliant version of Masha, and she makes so much sense for it tonally. If you've seen her performance in Sex Education on Netflix, Tanya Reynolds is so well situated as a performer to be able to play misery in the face of comedy and to navigate those two things and with a little shift in her delivery, take us to a place of slightly more conviction and slightly more seriousness. I also think there's something incredibly genuine about the way that she displays not only this unrequited, intense love, but also the adolescent mental health in there as well. I think it's a wonderful performance from her, really, really fantastic of Blanchett. I've talked a little about the emotional range that she is armed with in this production, but she's pretty glorious before we go to that more genuine and more guttural place. And there's so much that she does physically which feels so purposeful, fiddling with a lighter during Constantine's performance, peering out underneath the VR goggles, moving to go and sit closer to Alexander. Everything about her body language and the way that she moves in his orbit, her focus is so utterly on him and she is so distracted by that, but also all of the aspects of this grand performance that she is giving as she is dropping into a split. She is just wonderful and luminous on this stage as she needs to be, as the character understands herself to be. Ultimately, I think this is a production that does bask in the comedy of despair. And even in these very bleakly staged final moments with Tanya as Masha reading out comedy bingo calls as they're all sat around miserably, there is no escaping the joy nor the sorrow of it all. It's a tremendous production to talk about. It's a tremendous production to go and see and really consider. This is something that gives you immense food for thought. This is not something obvious and it's something I can understand many different interpretations of critically. If I was to read a two star review of this play, I would understand. If I was to read a five star review of this play, I would entirely understand. I am so grateful for the opportunity to really consider the thing. I don't know that I think it's a definitive production of the Seagull, but it is, for many reasons, pretty remarkable. If you can get a ticket, go and see it. Congratulations to you. If you already got one, and if you have already seen it, please let us know in the comment section below what you thought of the Seagull. Thank you for listening to this review. Stay tuned for many more coming soon and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Minky Jo Theatre. My God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a Stagey day. Subscribe.