Great news everyone! BBC reports that Cate Blanchett sets her return to London Stage with Barbican Theatre’s production of The Seagull. She will play Arkadina, an actress and one of the four central characters in the play. It will have limited run of 6 weeks from February 2025. Tickets on sale on 9 October. You can sign up for priority access here.

She has been in the 1997 production of the The Seagull as Nina with the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. It was directed by Neil Armfield.

Actress Cate Blanchett is to return to the stage for the first time in six years, with a role in Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull.

The Oscar winner will play Arkadina in the new adaptation, which will also star Strike actor Tom Burke.

The show will play at the Barbican Theatre in London for six weeks from February.

Its director Thomas Ostermeier described Blanchett as a “once-in-a-generation actress”.

The new adaptation will mark a reunion for Blanchett and Burke, who recently completed filming for Steven Soderbergh’s forthcoming film Black Bag.

Ostermeier told BBC News: “I have known and admired Cate for many years, and to see her on stage is always a privilege.

“I am thrilled that we will make our first artistic collaboration with this production of The Seagull at the Barbican, and that London will experience this once-in-a-generation actress in one of the greatest theatrical roles of Arkadina.

“I’m also very pleased to be forging a new artistic relationship with Tom Burke, who will play the role of Trigorin.”

Blanchett’s character Arkadina is a celebrated actress whose larger-than-life presence dominates both the stage and her personal relationships.

But when she arrives at her family’s country estate for the weekend, she must navigate a series of conflicts.

Her son struggles to step out of her shadow, and her lover becomes the romantic target of an aspiring young actress. The play explores themes including ambition, vanity, disappointment and desire.

The Seagull will be produced by Wessex Grove, the same team behind Ostermeier’s production of An Enemy of the People, which starred Matt Smith earlier this year.

Blanchett last performed on the Barbican stage in 2012’s Big and Small (Gross und Klein).

Her last theatre role overall, however, was just before the Covid pandemic, in a 2019 production of When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other at the National Theatre.

Blanchett stars as Arkadina, a celebrated actress whose larger-than-life presence dominates both the stage and her personal relationships. Arriving at her family’s country estate for the weekend, she finds herself caught up in a storm of conflicting desires. Her playwright son, Konstantin, struggles to step out of her shadow as he pursues his own artistic ambitions and her lover Trigorin, played by Tom Burke, becomes the object of affection for the aspiring young actress Nina.

As their lives entwine and they each grapple with their desires, ambitions, and disappointments, Chekhov’s timeless story unfolds in a gripping tale of vanity, power, and the sacrifices made in the name of art.

This new adaptation by Duncan Macmillan (People Places & Things) and Thomas Ostermeier (An Enemy of the People) will run for six weeks only next Spring.

Mon 7 Oct: 10am Barbican Patrons Priority 
Mon 7 Oct: 4pm Barbican Members Plus Priority
Tue 8 Oct: 10am: Barbican Members Priority
Tue 8 Oct: 4pm: Wessex Grove Priority
Wed 9 Oct: 10am Public booking opens

Tickets start at £20, and for every performance there are over 100 tickets at that price.

EDIT: For fans from outside the UK who are thinking of going to see the play.

BARBICAN — An exciting benefit of Barbican Membership is receiving priority access to book tickets. We anticipate that this benefit will be popular for our upcoming production of THE SEAGULL.

Whilst we proudly offer priority access to Members, the number of tickets available with any priority booking period is capped for each performance, to enable fair access to tickets for everyone – including the general public.

We can never guarantee that you’ll be successful for booking tickets during the priority period as the allocation may become exhausted very quickly, especially for THE SEAGULL as we anticipate a very high demand for tickets by Members and the general public.

A part of an old interview with Sydney Morning Herald when Cate played Nina in The Seagull.

Neil phone Armfield call he recounts received from Jane Campion after she saw The Seagull. “She said Cate’s Nina was so utterly perfect and true she just wished Chekhov had been able to see it,” he says. “She said it was the sort of performance a writer would hope for but never expect.” Armfield puts that sort of reaction down to Blanchett’s “amazing vulnerability” as an actress and her absolute ability to commit to an idea on stage; to give focus to a moment”.

Of all the roles she has played in the past year, it is Nina that preoccupies Blanchett on the Thursday before she leaves to take on the world. And it’s not just because she has done eight shows a week for four months. “The Seagull has really thrown up a lot of questions for me because it is about theatre and the way you endure a life in the theatre or in the arts and keep working,” she says. “It’s been very confronting at this particular time. I love attacking character and inhabiting somebody else’s shoes com-pletely, but this time the masks have been egg-shell thin. It’s almost as though we have been asked to play ourselves, even though they’re not our words or our psyches.”

Source: BBC, WhatsonStage, SMH, Barbican – The Seagull,