THE SEAGULL official opened on Thursday (6 March) at the Barbican. Cate Blanchett and the play receive glowing reviews from London theatre critics. The new adaption of Anton Chekhov’s first play is co-written by Duncan MacMillan and Thomas Ostermeier, with the later directing. The cast and crew attended the press night after-party with guests like Andrew Upton, Ben Whishaw, Nina Hoss, Adeel Akhtar, Denise Gough, James Norton, Tom Sturridge, Emily Beecham.

The play runs until 5 April, tickets can be booked here.

At every performance, a limited number of great seats priced at just £35 will be released via a weekly Lottery in partnership with TodayTix. More info about the lottery here.

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Reviews & Interview

Below are just excerpts from reviews from different outlets, we linked the full reviews at the end of each excerpts.

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.

Full review on The Telegraph

So ferocious is the in-your-face farce and polemic of some of this sold-out production’s early scenes, that one wonders whether Chekhov’s subtle characters, self-indulgent and naïve as they often are, will find breathing space. With an almost unstoppable flood of contemporary theatre trickery (vaping, swearing, texting, beer cans, quad bikes, and spoken stage directions amongst others) the production might struggle with lesser performers. That it works so well is down to a truly sublime cast, led by the spellbinding Cate Blanchett, which finds and mines the piece’s poignant human drama.

Blanchett’s Arkádina is a swirling hurricane of egotistical self-regard: a narcissistic, status-obsessed, hack actress who has forgotten how not to act. She wears a T-shirt with her own name imprinted on it; literally and metaphorically embodying a performer in the shell of a human being. It is a performance of jaw-dropping chutzpah and raw, enticing physicality.

Full review on The Reviews Hub

Blanchett is fabulously entertaining as this self-involved, limelight-hogging, needily territorial diva (Ostermeier winks at her real-life overpowering A-lister status). But the shattering moment comes when she fights against another, unwelcome role, that of the rejected woman begging her lover not to leave her for a younger model. Blanchett breaks out of the “scene”, her whole performance shifting to raw, vulnerable and softly naturalistic. It’s naked emotion, startling amid the studied artifice, and it is electrifying.

But, magnetic though Blanchett is, this is a unified ensemble effort. Tom Burke is tremendous as a compulsively vampiric writer whose detachment, which initially seems amusingly eccentric, is revealed to be chillingly sociopathic. Wonderful too are Emma Corrin as the hungry, intelligent but too-breakable Nina, Tanya Reynolds’s deadpan depressive Masha, glued to her vape, and, in a notable stage debut, Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Konstantin: furious adolescent angst personified. I’ve never before felt so viscerally that he and Arkadina pose a vicious existential threat to one another.

Yet the quiet soul of the whole piece is Jason Watkins as Peter Sorin, the civil servant who fears he was irrelevant in life, and is now drifting towards an equally ignominious death. It’s his story that forms the bedrock of a production in which the countryside reads explicitly as a kind of spiritual limbo: when characters enter Magda Willi’s sky-high thicket of reeds, they vanish from our plane.

It’s such a rich reading of the play, deftly switching gear from caustic humour – this is, hands down, the funniest Seagull I’ve ever seen – to philosophical exploration around generational tension, financial hardship, social change, gendered double standards around ageing, and whether art can make a difference in a troubled world: is it an escape or a reckoning?

But it’s the tenderness that strikes you most, especially in the compassionate second half. Can we ever understand our human behaviour – and, even if we do, can we really change it? It’s Masha’s words that keep haunting me: “If you can fall in love, you can climb back out of it.” If only the head could so easily overrule the heart. Magnificent theatre.

Full review on London Theatre

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.

…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.

The great Arkadina (Blanchett) is a vain Hollywood actress, Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee) a frustrated nepo baby writer who can’t escape the shadow of his attention-hoovering mother, while Trigorin is a writer who puts himself on the same shelf as Ian McEwan. With great humour but, more importantly, great complexity, Ostermeier lets Chekhov’s long love centipede (Medvedenko loves Masha loves Konstantin loves Nina loves Tregorin etc) play out.

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. Her Arkadina can’t stop acting. Every line is an aria, a song-and-dance moment. Some speeches burst into song, even tap dance – at one point she does the splits. She’s never able to fully engage with the person she’s talking to because she’s always playing to the gallery.

You keep thinking, as all the characters face their reckoning, that the carapace will crack, but it never does. Even as she begs her lover not to leave her for a 20-year-old girl, it’s still a performance. She strips to her waist, writhes on the floor, cries. ‘You think I’m acting?’ she weeps at Trigorin. Yes, is the answer. It’s an immensely skilled performance from Blanchett, to act acting like that, and to do it in so many different ways.

Full review on The Standard

In German director Thomas Ostermeier’s engrossing update of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, moody aspiring playwright Konstantin rages against an establishment that won’t appreciate his talents. “Theatre is awful. It’s overpriced, elitist, indulgent, outdated and entirely irrelevant to what’s actually happening in the world,” he complains.

But Ostermeier’s production absolves itself of most of these charges, even though it’s stuffed with enough big names – not least Cate Blanchett as deluded actress Arkadina – to ensure that tickets will only make their way into the hands of a lucky few. 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.

Full review on Independent

The Seagull, with an all-star cast headed by Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke, Emma Corrin and Kodi Smit-McPhee, has been one of the hottest tickets in town for a while now. 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.

It very deliberately circles issues of artifice and reality, of true feelings and performance, of the very purpose of art, enfolding the audience in its examination. It feels urgent, present. The house lights come up as Burke’s writer Trigorin, reconfigured here as the kind of successful writer whose books “people buy in airports”, comes forward to exclaim: “Art has never been less relevant than it is now, and my art is the least relevant of all. The only way a book could change the world nowadays is if it’s lit on fire and hurled through a window.”

That’s the underlying theme to all the action, set by designer Magda Willi on a bare stage, dominated by a huge patch of rustling reeds, from which characters suddenly emerge. Atmosphere is provided by Bruno Poet’s changeable lighting, which, as the story progresses, makes the greenery cast dark shadows, enclosing the scene.

It works surprisingly effectively, making the lakeside where Corrin’s Nina presents an avant-garde play by Kostya (an anxiously vulnerable Smit-McPhee) the centre of the action as well as the mood. It’s here that Blanchett’s monstrously self-absorbed actress Irina Arkadina first appears in a purple jumpsuit and shades (costumes by Marg Horwell) to take the spotlight onto herself and wreak chaos in the lives around her.

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. Where much of the action is detailed, this is a huge characterisation, impressively physically adept – there’s one glorious moment where she sprawls on the floor in dismay and then gently pulls a suitcase under her head so she is comfortable. At another, she does the splits in sequinned trousers while proclaiming: “I never think about the future.”

In refusing the claims of young people and preserving her own eternal youth, she does – as Kostya suggests – make herself obsolete. She is a caricature of what she could have been. Blanchett catches all the farce of that, but not quite the sadness underlying it. The production draws on her energy, but it’s at its most fascinating when its lesser characters are in play.

Full review on WhatsonStage

Chekhov could never have imagined the many different interpretations that would be staged of his first great play, The Seagull, and he would certainly have struggled to picture one featuring quad bikes, VR headsets, and a golf buggy!  This is Thomas Ostermeier’s highly anticipated production of The Seagull, now playing at the Barbican Theatre, and it’s a breathtaking spectacle that both honours Chekhov’s classic and reinvents it for a modern audience.

The Seagull weaves a complex tapestry of unrequited love and artistic ambition set against the backdrop of a Russian country estate. The story revolves around the fading actress Arkádina, her son Konstantin (Kosta in this version), and their entangled relationships with those around them.

Kosta, an aspiring playwright, seeks to revolutionise theatre and win the affections of Nina, a young actress from a neighbouring estate. However, Nina becomes infatuated with Trigorin, a successful writer and Arkadina’s lover.

Leading the cast is Cate Blanchett, who returns to the London stage after a seven-year absence. Blanchett’s Arkádina is a triumph, a larger-than-life presence that dominates both the stage and the lives of those around her. Imagine Edina from Ab Fab, but even more self-obsessed. Her portrayal of a celebrated actress who isn’t always the star of the show in real life is grotesquely funny and deeply sensitive, capturing the character’s vanity and insecurity with laser-focussed precision. Blanchett’s command of the role is absolute, at one point the audience unsure if we’re still watching a play, or a real-life breakdown.

Ostermeier’s direction, in collaboration with Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation, unlocks the power of The Seagull for a modern audience, bringing a thrilling clarity to Chekhov’s exploration of art, ambition, and the human condition.

This Seagull soars on the strength of its extraordinary ensemble cast, led by Blanchett. This is how you reinvent a masterpiece; it’s a production that reminds us why Chekhov’s play has endured for over a century, but more importantly, offers fresh insights into its characters and themes.

Full review on TheatreWeekly

The biggest and most memorable performance comes from Cate Blanchett who is truly mesmerising as Irina Arkadina. In a demanding performance, Blanchett wows as the celebrated actress in a performance that has her singing, tap-dancing and doing the splits. Her embodiment of the role is a testament to her phenomenal talents as an actress with her own larger-than-life star causing for lines to be blurred, adding to the believability of this often eccentric individual. The versatility required for her in this performance has some beautiful, vulnerable moments mixed in with her more anarchic characteristics. Though there are large periods where she isn’t seen on stage, Blanchett is never far from memory in an outstanding performance.

Emma Corrin similarly has a lot of differing qualities to unpack as Nina. Their sweet, seemingly innocent nature in the early scenes of The Seagull paves way for a tragic figure in the show’s climax in one of the most striking performance in the play. Jason Watkins is a comic highlight as Sorin who somehow has the knack for immaculate comedy timing, even when he is on his death bed. Tom Burke balances the larger-than-life characters with a more calm, neutral demeanour as Trigorin, while Zachary Hunt has a rather unique role as Simon, getting several rocking performances along the way.=

The most spell-binding performance for me came from Kodi Smit-McPhee, impressively making his professional stage debut as Konstantin. As the haunted playwright, he is utterly gripping, never needing to exaggerate his actions to make his emotions abundantly clear. Though he is playing alongside some of the acting greats, he more than holds his own with a stage presence that ensures.

Full review on All That Dazzles

Thomas Ostermeier’s bold, new revival of The Seagull, co-adapted by Duncan Macmillan and Ostermeier, makes Chekhov’s timeless modern classic even more relevant to contemporary audiences. Its playful, sharp delivery, and unconventional staging, sends the seagull on a rebellious soar at the Barbican, with a cheeky little wink at unexpected places.

Overall, Ostermeier’s dry humour and sharp comic timing keeps the tone light even among the weightier themes. Ostermeier plays with the concept of blurring the lines between performance and reality throughout, leaving the audience wondering: What is real? What is performative? This ambiguity is intriguing, adding a layer of self-awareness to the staging.

What jumps out of the production is the frequently broken fourth wall – a daring move for a Chekhov who, alongside Stanislavski, cemented the concept of the fourth wall in modern day theatre. This is certainly a very rebellious move, just like the play itself in so many ways!

Cate Blanchett is magnetic as Irina Arkadina. Returning to the stage once again, her presence is as strong and electric as ever, her delivery sharp and playful, and her emotional connection deeply engaging. She is eye drawing, not because of her fame, but her commanding stage presence. The production also uses her fame as a thoughtful device, rather than pretending; they made it an inside joke, placing her in a dynamic that mirrors her fame as Arkadina and as herself, further blurring the boundaries between reality and the play.

Priyanga Burford as Paulina Shamrayev, though not onstage as frequently, has a memorable and engaging presence. Her ability to land humour and emotional beats gives her a strong presence. Simon Medvedenko, also partially a narrator in this adaptation, performed by Zachary Hart, has a beautiful voice, adding a unique element to the production, making his performance feel almost like a live concert at times. Masha Shamrayev portrayed by Tanya Reynolds is a standout. Her playful, unique take on Masha shines new light on the traditionally repressed portrayal of this troubled character, injecting the character with a fresh vitality. Even in her black outfit, her presence radiates colour. Kodi Smit-McPhee’s portrayal of Konstantin captures the intense self-rumination of the character, but his journey feels a little stagnant from scene to scene. Whether due to the adaptation or performance choices, there is little sense of character journey, making it difficult to fully connect with his struggles. A stronger character arc could give his story greater impact. Jason Watkins’ Peter Sorin is probably one of the most watchable actors on stage in this production. His comic timing is impeccable, making every moment with him on stage a delight. A complete joy!

Full review on West End Bestriend

Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett is as distinguished on stage as she is on film. As Irina Arkadina, the over-the-hill, over-the-top actress of Chekhov’s play, she is both venomous and vulnerable, clinging to her younger lover, best-selling writer Trigorin (Tom Burke) while deriding the playwriting aspirations of her son Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Mean spirited and just plain mean – “I don’t have the money” she wails when asked for financial help, “It costs a fortune to be me!” – she delivers a fabulous performance in director Thomas Ostermeier’s fabulous ensemble production. Fading star Irina arrives at her country estate where Konstantin is presenting his new play, an experimental end-of-the-world borefest featuring Nina (Emma Corrin), the wannabe actress with whom he is besotted.

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.

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.

Blanchett is mercurial as Irina, whether dancing in a desperate attempt to recapture her youthful spirit or removing her blouse and humiliating herself in an attempt to redirect Trigorin’s attention away from the starstruck Nina.

Burke is coolly arrogant as Trigorin whose calm demeanour hides a cancerous regret for his missed youth and a reptilian vanity and that has terrible consequences.

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 that interrogates the purpose of theatre itself as well as exploring the regrets, disappointments, unfulfilled dreams and misaligned romantic attractions of every character.

A dazzling, powerfully entertaining night.

Full review on Daily Express

Arkadina is absurd and OTT, and in her performance Blanchett has a ball satirising what I would assume are the celebrity circles she herself hangs out in. With her eye-popping wardrobe, weapons-grade cattiness, absurd lack of self-consciousness and occasional flashes of a messiah complex, she’s like Blanche DuBois crossed with Patsy from Ab Fab crossed with Bono. The character was always a portrait of insecurity, but Blanchett, Macmillan and Ostermeier have added to that a withering but very funny send up of actual celebrity, something that didn’t really exist in Chekhov’s day.

She’s great, and very funny. But it’s hard to really place her with Burke’s Trigorin, a thoughtful, intense man whose main point of chemistry with Arkadina seems to be his obliviousness to her shenanigans. It’s hardly a surprise that he falls for Emma Corrin’s delightful Nina: gangly and androgynous, she’s hardly the stereotypical hot young thing consumed by her ambition, but rather a serious and intelligent woman who has a genuine meeting of minds with Trigorin as they launch into a colossally long chat about the nature of art and celebrity (NB Corrin is non-binary but as with many of their roles, Nina is a very much a she). There’s an unusual generosity in the play’s treatment of these two characters that’s refreshing – certainly I didn’t feel grubby in investing in their relationship.

Full review on TimeOut

Blanchett’s diva certainly arrives with a bang. Dressed in a lilac jumpsuit, biker jacket and shades, this is a woman desperately not acting her age — strutting in affected, hip-jutting poses, constantly throwing her hair back in slow-motion, at one point breaking into a tap-dance routine that ends in an albeit impressive, yet groan-inducing splits, every painful second simply accentuating Arkadina’s vanity.

It will continue to be a thoroughly enjoyable physical and comic performance. But the fun doesn’t detract from the character’s shallowness (even at her most vulnerable, as Trigorin acknowledges his feelings for Nina, her pleas to him seem scripted, something she’s acted before) or the terrible damage that her lack of care inflicts upon her son.

Full review on THR

Press Night After PartyWhatsOnStage Interview

The Seagull cast: Cate Blanchett as Irina Arkádina, Tom Burke as Alexander Trigorin, Emma Corrin as Nina Zaréchnaya, Paul Bazely as Evgeny Dorn, Priyanga Burford as Polina Shamrayev, Zachary Hart as Simon Medvedenko, Paul Higgins as Ilya Shamrayev, Tanya Reynolds as Masha Shamrayev, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Konstantin Treplev, and Jason Watkins as Peter Sorin.

Creative team are Magda Willi on set design, Marg Horwell on costume design, Tom Gibbons on sound design, and Jim Carnahan and Liz Fraser on casting.