Seagulls, songs and superstars

Your guide to what to (try to) see this week and beyond in London

Cate Blanchett, with Zachary Hart in The Seagull at the Barbican. Photo: Marc Brenner

Apologies, because it’s near-impossible to get tickets to The Seagull at the Barbican because of its absurdly starry cast, but you’re going to read about it anyway. Hi!

What I’ve seen

Cate Blanchett is the biggest name, playing the narcissistic actress Irina Arkadina, spending the summer at her family’s country house, with a fantastically ghastly vigour, but Tom Burke, as her watchful novelist lover Alexander Trigorin, is a quiet treat too.

As is the luminous Emma Corrin, as Irina’s neighbour Nina, a naive but sparky young woman who dreams of being a famous actress but is kept almost imprisoned by her cruel father and stepmother at their estate.

Kodi Smit-McPhee is petulant and damaged as Irina’s son Konstantin - in love with Nina, loved by Masha, the daughter of the couple who care for the house (Tanya Reynolds - wonderfully dour and spiky) and struggling desperately to emerge from his mothers shadow.

It’s Chekhov, so obviously everyone loves the wrong person and nearly everyone is trapped in their own selfish world, unable to reach out. Those who do - Nina, but also Masha’s mother Polina (Priyanga Burford), embroiled in an unsatisfactory affair with local doctor Evgeny (Paul Bazely) - are disappointed to say the least.

Though he called The Seagull a comedy (with a bleak sort of humour that strikes me as very Russian, in my limited experience of the country), Chekhov’s stories always seem to be about waste - wasted time, wasted lives - and his sympathy for the plight of women shines through.

I hugely enjoyed it, slightly to my surprise. I always forget how much I actually really like Chekhov and Thomas Ostermeier’s production is hugely entertaining, with a surprising number of laughs. Irina and Trigorin are great roles, and Corrin really brings Nina, who can be a bit weedy, to sparkling life. You can really see the open-hearted, curious girl’s potential, which makes what happens to her even more tragic.

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Hear our review of The Seagull and loads of other shows on The London Theatre Review podcast, out now here, or wherever you get your podcasts

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Magda Willi’s set, with a huge clump of eight foot grasses through with the characters push their way to reach the lakeside jetty (we, the audience, are the lake), is simple but effective, and the breaking of the fourth wall by local factory worker and odd job man Simon Medvedenko (Zachary Hart, hugely sympathetic) to play the odd bit of pointed Billy Bragg is surprisingly un-annoying. He’s in unrequited love with Masha, of course.

By the time he wrote The Seagull in 1895, Chekhov, who was a physician as well as one of the greatest dramatists of the age, had spent time working in a remote Siberian penal colony, recording his observations and carrying out a census of the 10,000-odd convicts and settlers there. He described it as hell on earth (his damning report actually inspired reform, which is kind of amazing). He also had TB, which he’d known about for a decade, so was acutely aware of the preciousness of every given day.