The Seagull Reviews Round-up: Starring Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke, Emma Corrin & Jason Watkins at the Barbican Theatre London

"The Seagull at the Barbican review: is Cate Blanchett's performance the year's best?"

"Blanchett delivers an highly skillful performance in director Thomas Ostermeier’s meta production of the Chekhov class"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Cate Blanchett's mesmerizing portrayal of Irina Arkadina in Chekhov's play"

"Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Irina Arkadina in Chekhov's play is a masterclass in complexity, blending venom with vulnerability in a way that captivates and intrigues."

"Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett is as distinguished on stage as she is on film.... she delivers a fabulous performance in director Thomas Ostermeier’s fabulous ensemble production."

"Dominated by a thicket of tall, reed-like grass, through which characters appear and disappear, plus a scattering of folding chairs, Duncan Macmillan’s contemporary adaptation may not be conventional Chekhov but it captures the playwright’s merciless yet compassionate view of his characters."

"Blasts of The Stranglers' hit Golden Brown (a song about heroin addiction) punctuate the action, providing an undercurrent of bittersweet melancholy to the often very funny ensemble performances and dialogue"

"A dazzling, powerfully entertaining night."

"Cate Blanchett and an all-star ensemble take wing"

"Thomas Ostermeier’s masterful staging has tremendous performances from a cast including Tom Burke, Emma Corrin and Kodi Smit-McPhee"

"Director Thomas Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan’s new version rather magically balances lightness, wit and melancholy from the off, as characters gather at a country estate in hipsterish modern dress."

"Blanchett may be the glitteriest of castings but this is a powerhouse ensemble that first matches and then outshines her in intensity. Her Arkadina is an actor off-stage, too, her fame an act of will in this household, and she pulls out the emotional theatrics to circumvent pain."

"Burke’s Trigorin is excellent – a covert narcissist whose humblebrags are so convincing, his self-centredness so entitled, that even his explanations for infidelity seem reasonable"

"Watkins lifts the minor part of Sorin and starts off as the best of the cast’s sad clowns, travels further into melancholy with his sense of having lived the wrong life – and then reaches the terrible realisation that it has not been lived at all. Smit-McPhee, in his stage debut, exudes emo-angst and rage towards Arkadina with some killer putdowns of her gen X failings. Emma Corrin, as Nina, brings immense integrity and depth."

"Sometimes reminiscent of Benedict Andrews’ supreme reinterpretation of The Cherry Orchard last year at the Donmar Warehouse, it is perhaps not as transformative. But it is no less magnetic, from the shifts within characters to the shift of tone in the last, dark act. A masterfully handled comedy where Chekhov’s gun sounds the tragic final note."

"Cate Blanchett is magnetic – and maddening – as faded actor Arkadina in Chekhov’s supreme play about writers"

"... this new adaptation by Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan, Chekhov’s 1896 drama brims with interest, even when snatched brutally into the present: sun loungers! Quad bikes! This is the best ever play about writers, and a real quizzing of drama."

"Cate Blanchett is a magnetic and maddening Arkadina. Full of allure and affectation, she gives not so much a portrait of a bad actor as of bad actoriness: leaping in a purple boiler suit; doing the splits (applause from the audience) in glitter trousers; tap dancing, flinging herself to the ground, fidgeting and rustling papers when the spotlight is on someone else."

"Almost every character has a moment when the stage takes on the colour of their personality, though I wish they did so without seizing one of the too-ubiquitous mics: the text is diminished by amplification."

"... this utterly different vivacity at the Barbican is proof of the morphing, soaring power of The Seagull."

"Cate Blanchett delivers the goods – and does the splits"

"Joined by Emma Corrin and Tom Burke, Blanchett is unmissable in this experimental take on Chekhov’s masterpiece"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Corrin lends Nina a winning elfin energy and gawky charm, although Burke’s obsessive Trigorin is less dashing, more subdued than expected."

"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."

"The Barbican’s star-studded The Seagull is an utterly engrossing update of Chekov"

"Cate Blanchett stars in a three-hour production of the classic play that’s languid, thoughtful, and often hilarious"

"... German director Thomas Ostermeier’s engrossing update of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull"

"It probes the relationship between art, obsession and self-deception, poring over and riffing on its themes like a rock song (“Golden Brown” by The Stranglers patterns through its scenes)."

"Blanchett’s Arkadina is wonderfully, hilariously crass, blinding the front row with her glittery jeans then nonplussing the whole audience by tapdancing into splits. Yet underneath the performative silliness, Blanchett conveys a sense of a cavernous emptiness – a detachment from her own emotions that means she can only express herself in a hammy karaoke of borrowed lines."

"The first few acts sing, powered by these characters’ ravening, punchily expressed hunger for fame, love and meaning. But when disillusionment sets in, the play loses momentum, sagging until it reaches its jarring climax. Perhaps that’s because Smit-McPhee’s understated Konstantin struggles to hold our attention as his desperation mounts – or perhaps that’s because Ostermeier’s three-hour production luxuriates in a play he clearly loves."

"Cate Blanchett leads an all-star production with vaping and rock songs"

"All the build-up has promised irreverence, a blowing away of the dust surrounding this famous 1895 drama: a contemporary setting, characters vaping and swearing, rock songs, microphones. Yet the really surprising thing about director Ostermeier’s superb production, in a magnificent adaptation by him and playwright Duncan Macmillan, is just how serious and sensitive it is in unpicking both the comic and tragic notes in Chekhov’s study of a group of unhappy, arty, self-obsessed people who can’t make any sense of their lives in a time of crisis – and have a miserable habit of falling in love with the wrong person."

"Ostermeier makes fascinating choices in how he presents the interplay of ideas as well as the skein of relationships."

"At the heart of it all is Blanchett’s Irina, a performance of massive intent, her histrionic interventions constantly drawing attention to the character’s terrifying, egotistical needs."

"The production draws on her energy, but it’s at its most fascinating when its lesser characters are in play."

"Cate Blanchett blazes on stage in The Seagull"

"She leads an impressive cast including Tom Burke and Emma Corrin in avant-garde director Thomas Ostermeier's cracking modern take on Chekhov "

"This time, Ostermeier has sensibly enlisted a native English-speaking writer – Duncan Macmillan – to work with him on the adaptation and the result is a cracker. The language and the costumes might be fiercely contemporary, but the masterful setting and characters are 100 per cent Chekhov."

"Compelling as the Chekhovian action is once we get to it, Ostermeier still makes us sit through a performer riding about on a quad bike, playing a Billy Bragg song on the guitar and asking us “Who wants a bit of Chekhov?” Quite what this adds is anyone’s guess, but once we’re in the midst of these lives wasting away with every heartbeat, it’s ferocious."

"... Blanchett’s Arkadina, a grandstanding grand dame in a purple jumpsuit, commands it all, a continual whirl of performative emotion encasing an empty centre."

"As ever in Chekhov, loyal retainers get ignored or left behind while the principal players go through their never-ending crises. The evening’s big winner, pace the in-play naysayers, is theatre itself."

"The superstar Cate Blanchett-led cast is a little overindulged in Thomas Ostermeier’s enjoyable but rambling Chekhov"

"It’s quite the coup for producers Wessex Grove: the first show Ostermeier has ever created in this country, following last year’s well-received English language premiere of his classic take on An Enemy of the People. Okay, it’s not as big a coup as bagging Blanchett, or indeed most of a dementedly stacked cast: Emma Corrin! Tom Burke! Kodi Smit-McPhee! Tanya Reynolds! Really, I could just list all the actors here! But it’s Ostermeier’s vision that defines, delights and frustrates."

"... there’s a definite sense that Ostermeier – billed as co-adaptor of the show along with playwright Duncan Macmillan – has been happy to let his production be led by the actors rather than a singular directorial vision. That leads to an enjoyable but somewhat indulgent three-hour show, in which the Seagull’s considerable ambiguities (is it a comedy? A tragedy? Both?) often feel pushed to their limit in all directions. In particular we have the odd situation where huge name Blanchett is essentially playing a light relief role, while Burke and Corrin are atypically earnest and wholesome as Arkadina’s novelist lover Trigorin and Nina, the ambitious young actress who catches his eye."

"Clever and engaging, yet faintly smug"

"Cate Blanchett is incandescent in a Chekhov adaptation from Thomas Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan that is relentlessly meta"

"What’s the point of art when the world is ending? In this of-the-moment take on Chekhov’s classic drama, frustrated young writer Konstantin takes to the mic to deliver a diatribe on our addiction to ineffectual old forms in times of crisis, when what we need is not complacent creatives, but heroes: “We need a Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” It’s a moment that is at once galvanising and cringe-inducing in its studenty earnestness."

"In an adaptation by playwright Duncan Macmillan and director Thomas Ostermeier, the production that surrounds it is relentlessly self-aware and archly meta, constantly confronting us with the artificiality of the spectacle we’re witnessing and demanding that we question what we’re doing there. But even as it sends up theatrical conventions and trends – those modish microphones come in for some mockery, for a start – it can’t resist them. It’s clever, and excellent performances from a cast led by Cate Blanchett mean it’s always engaging. Yet there’s something faintly smug about it; the experience is akin to watching a purring cat assiduously lick itself all over."

"At last, a West End drama starring a movie idol that's not a dud. Take a bow, Cate"

"After a string of theatrical duds, misfires and howlers involving Hollywood heavyweights Sigourney Weaver, Rami Malek and Brie Larson, Cate Blanchett was the latest star of the big screen to have a go on the London stage last night. Happily, she stops the rot. But, to be fair, that is thanks in large part to a remarkable ensemble of home-grown talent including the estimable Tom Burke (The Three Musketeers) and Emma Corrin (The Crown)."

"Not only has Ostermeier dressed his cast like down-at-heel country folk – he has them share seemingly rambling asides on microphones. That’s when we’re not being blasted by The Stranglers’ heroin song Golden Brown, emphasising (I suppose) the fact that fame is a dangerous drug. After three hours, I tired of these showily unshowy antics. Yet I couldn’t fault the actors’ individual turns. Not Blanchett’s manic Arkadina, not Burke’s gloomily taciturn"

"The challenge is to make all these parts pull in the same direction, on a journey of laughter and despair. I’m afraid that didn’t quite happen for me, and may explain the unusually patchy standing ovation at the end."

"Cate Blanchett can’t save clichéd Chekhov"

"Although the actress radiates star presence — in brief doses — subtlety is in short supply in a long evening full of trendy directorial interventions"

"The good news is that this offering from the iconoclastic German director Thomas Ostermeier, starring Cate Blanchett, isn’t quite as irksome as the hipster version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People that he brought to the West End last year."

"The songs of Billy Bragg get dusted down this time, Zachary Hart’s guitar-toting Medvedenko kicking off the evening by regaling the audience with rock ’n’ roll patter"

"If you’re an Ostermeier fan, this Chekhov adaptation — co-written with our own Duncan Macmillan — is another example of 21st-century drama at its most audacious. For those of us in the sceptical camp, it’s a little like seeing a classic rewritten with children’s crayons, even if Blanchett’s casting has turned the venture into the hottest of hot tickets."

"If Ostermeier’s treatment has a saving grace, it’s that it at least delivers on the sly humour."