It is all too easy to be cynical when movie stars turn to theater — not least because, of late, they haven’t always been very good at it. In recent weeks, London’s stages have played host to several slightly iffy productions of classic plays featuring big-name screen actors: Sigourney Weaver in “The Tempest,” Rami Malek in “Oedipus,” and Brie Larson in “Elektra.” So when Cate Blanchett rolled into town for a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” at the Barbican Theater, a little trepidation could be forgiven.
But Blanchett is different. Though she is best known for her film work, the Australian actress has graced the stage to acclaim throughout her career, playing lead roles in “Hedda Gabler” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And she is no stranger to Chekhov, having starred in the Sydney Theater Company’s “Uncle Vanya,” and the same company’s 2017 adaptation of “Platonov,” called “The Present.” She met her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, while performing in a 1997 production of “The Seagull.”
In this modern dress production of “The Seagull,” adapted by Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier (“Who Killed My Father,” “Returning to Reims”), Blanchett plays Irina Arkadina, a famous older actress whose pathological self-obsession alienates her son, Konstantin Treplev (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to the point of despair. He’s a young writer struggling to find his voice, and disaffected with the risk-averse banality of the artistic mainstream. (“We need new voices, new perspectives, new forms!”)
Arkadina’s lover, Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke), is a successful author of middlebrow fiction who represents everything Konstantin wants to tear down. So when the older man effortlessly seduces Konstantin’s sweetheart, the aspiring actress Nina Zarechnaya (Emma Corrin), the blow is doubly crushing.
Chekhov conceived Arkadina as a “foolish, mendacious, self-admiring egoist,” and Blanchett realizes this vision with exuberant brio from the moment she first appears onstage. Her Arkadina, wearing a purple jumpsuit and large sunglasses, channels the vapid can-do spirit of an online wellness influencer; inordinately proud of her well-preserved appearance, she tap dances and does splits to show off her litheness. She’s the life of the party — her diva-level prancing recalls Joanna Lumley’s Patsy in “Absolutely Fabulous” — but emotionally she’s withholding. When Konstantin puts on an avant-garde play, she dismisses it as “indulgent, adolescent crap.” Even in rare moments of tenderness her language is glib, cooingly manipulative. (“Poor little crumpet!”)
In stark contrast to these histrionics, the other three principals are played in a conspicuously muted style. Smit-McPhee — who shot to attention in “The Power of Dog,” and is now making his stage debut — is believable and sympathetic as the brooding, gawky Young Turk, but a little too insistently wan. Burke’s Trigorin is furtively laconic, delivering every line in an inscrutably flat intonation and with the abstracted expression of someone remembering a dream. When falling for Nina, he is curiously spaced-out, more hypnotized than horny. Corrin, exhibiting the same delicate poise that so gracefully rendered Princess Diana in “The Crown,” doesn’t wholly convince as an ambitious ingénue: This Nina is just a bit too serene and knowing; there’s no hunger there, no rawness.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and Blanchett enthusiastically fills it, with a little help from a charismatic ensemble of secondary characters. Zachary Hart is funny and genial as the downtrodden Medvedenko, a schoolteacher in the original script but reimagined here as a forklift truck driver. Slightly patronizingly, he is dressed in a soccer jersey to indicate that he is working class. (The costumes are by Marg Horwell.) Jason Watkins as Arkadina’s doddering, kindly brother, Sorin; Paul Bazely as the smooth-talking local doctor, Dorn; and Paul Higgins as the sycophantic estate manager, Shamrayev, all have great presence, and their idle badinage gives the piece its distinctive comic ambience. The pick of the bunch is Tanya Reynolds, endearingly nerdy as Shamrayev’s lovelorn daughter, Masha, who pines for Konstantin but must make do with Medvedenko.
The climactic scene, in which Nina reconnects with Konstantin two years later only to break his heart once and for all, is disappointingly rendered as unmitigated melodrama. Nina, now eking out a living as a pantomime performer, jabbers semi-coherently; rather than transcending her ordeal, she seems utterly defeated by it. The play ends with a tragedy, and no consolation.
Magda Willi’s set is bare but for some plastic chairs and a mass of tall reeds symbolizing the country estate on which these events unfold. And Ostermeier’s signature touches (musical flourishes, microphone stands, playful breaching of the fourth wall) are there from the start. The show opens with Hart’s Medvedenko zooming onto the stage on a quad bike; after dismounting he picks up an electric guitar, does a bit of crowd work, and belts out a number by the English protest singer Billy Bragg. Other actors then emerge from the foliage, and the story gets underway in earnest. Later, he delivers two more Bragg songs.
Ostermeier has directed a break-dancing “Hamlet,” and in his 2024 take on Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” the actors performed songs by David Bowie and Oasis. These musical flourishes don’t do much to enhance “The Seagull,” so their inclusion here feels a little perfunctory. It’s as if the director is imposing his style halfheartedly, for the sake of branding. The play hangs together almost in spite of him.
Ostermeier, a sometime enfant terrible who once ruffled feathers in his native Germany with his brash aesthetic choices and left-wing zeal, embodies the artistic conflicts explored in Chekhov’s play. Indeed, when Konstantin, delivering a line from Ostermeier and Macmillan’s adapted text, blusters that there should be “No more cultural funding for anyone over 40,” echoing Ostermeier’s own provocative remark along those lines, made in a 2001 interview.
This self-deprecating in-joke betrays a real anxiety: Is Ostermeier, now in his mid-50s, creatively moribund? Konstantin loses his way because his Oedipal anguish is inextricably bound up in his quest for artistic self-knowledge; there is no way out of the loop. Ostermeier has been more fortunate, but his “new forms” have now ossified into orthodoxy, and he’s unsure what do with himself.
The Seagull
Through April 5 at the Barbican Theater in London; barbican.org.uk.