07-03-2025
The Seagull: Cate Blanchett delivers the goods – and does the splits
Cate Blanchett is back on the London stage for the first time in six years, playing the feted, self-absorbed, glamorous actress Arkadina in Chekhov's first theatrical masterpiece The Seagull (1896). The production, whose stellar wattage is boosted by Emma Corrin and Tom Burke (the former plays Nina, the young would-be actress whom Burke's famous writer Trigorin falls for, despite being tied to Arkadina), has seen a box-office stampede.
Anyone expecting genteel period-fidelity for this anatomy of dissatisfaction and emotional meets existential crisis on a rural (Russian) estate should note that the film star doesn't make conventional theatre choices. Whether it's Susan Traherne, the wartime secret agent falling apart in David Hare's Plenty, or When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, a dark tale of abuse by Martin Crimp based on Samuel Richardson's Pamela – she likes material with a provocative edge.
That last, notorious London project saw Blanchett strapping on a dildo, and simulating sex. There's nothing so wayward here, and German director Thomas Ostermeier hardly invites uproar in his treatment, using a text by Duncan Macmillan that stays broadly faithful to the original play.
Compared to Jamie Lloyd's tedious sedentary version a few years back, it's almost mainstream. Even so, the language is contemporary, allowing expletives, and the approach is experimental, in keeping with Chekhov's form-pushing radicalism. Liberties are taken from the moment Zachary Hart's Medvedenko arrives on an off-road bike, surveys the scene (a clump of bullrushes set amid a wide sky, the audience situated where the lake would be), and engages in banter ('Who wants a bit of Chekhov?') and a warm-up song (by Billy Bragg). He then converses with Tanya Reynolds' Masha while they play badminton.
There's more borderline gimmickry where that came from (the gathering at the al fresco presentation by Konstantin, Arkadina's son, don daft VR headsets). You fear Ostermeier will overdo the comedy, but there's a palpable freshness to his approach. Even if one can do without some of the innovations (I loved the aching deployment of the Stranglers' hit Golden Brown, less so a blast of howlingly loud intermission music), Blanchett's performance is unmissable.
She's treading in gilded footsteps – Judi Dench, Kristin Scott Thomas and Meryl Streep among them – but, emerging from the thicket as if landed from LA, in shades and purple jump-suit, she makes this diva of a mother her own. She trades on those magazine-cover looks and air of fame, teasing us, in a work that plays with ideas of artifice and reality, with what's put-on, what's sincere. Some of her antics are tactical – kittenishly dancing to demonstrate her residual youth, with the splits thrown in – but she has the measure of a woman using lofty control to mask mid-life and maternal pain.
Corrin lends Nina a winning elfin energy and gawky charm, although Burke's obsessive Trigorin is less dashing, more subdued than expected. Among a generally fine cast, hats off to Jason Watkins as Arkadina's kindly, ever-more ailing brother, and to stage debutant Kodi Smit-McPhee, the picture of youthful vulnerability as the neglected, self-destructive Konstantin. Is this long night worth north of £200 for the best seats? Well, the play will surely return soon; but a cast like this is a rare event.
