It is all too easy to be cynical when cinema stars turn to the theater – not least because, recently, they have not always been very good. In recent weeks, the London stages have hosted several slightly uncertain productions of classic shows with actors of big names: Sigourney Weaver in “The Tempest”, Rami Malek in “Oedipus” and Brie Larson in “Elektra”. So when Cate Blanchett wandered in the city for a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull”, to Barbican Theater, a little trepidation could be forgiven.
But Blanchett is different. Although he is known above all for her film work, the Australian actress honored the stage to acclaim during her career, playing main roles in “Hedda Gabler” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”. And it is not extraneous to Chekhov, having starred in “Uncle Vanya” of the Sydney Theater Company and the adaptation of the same 2017 company as “Platonov”, called “the present”. She met her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, while performing in a 1997 production of “The Seagull”.
In this modern production of clothes 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 alien pathological self-obsession with her son, Konstantin Treplev (Kodi Smit-Mcphee), to the point. desperate. He is a young writer who struggles to find his voice and disaffected with the adverse banality of the risk of artistic mainstream. (“We need new voices, new perspectives, new forms!”)
Arkadina’s lover, Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke), is a successful author of MiddlebroW Fiction that represents everything Konstantin wants to break down. So when the oldest man seduces the sweet half of Konstantin, aspiring actress Nina Zarechnaya (Emma Corrin), the blow is doubly overwhelmingly overwhelming.
Chekhov conceived Arkadina as a “foolish, mendacious and self-member” selfish “and Blanchett realizes this vision with an exuberant panache from the moment he appears on stage for the first time. His arkadina, who wears a purple suit and large sunglasses, channels the vapid can-do spirit of an online wellness influencer; Proudly proud of his well preserved appearance, he touches dancing and divides himself to show his Lentess. It is the life of the party-his dirty survey recalls Joanna Lumley’s patsy in “absolutely fabulous” -What emotionally he is holding. When Konstantin stages an avant -garde game, he rejects him as “indulgent lousy and teenagers”. Even in the rare moments of tenderness his language is Gib, manipulative. (“Poor small crumpet!”)
In stark contrast to these histrionics, the other three principals are played in an evidently silent style. Smit-McPhee-Che fired at the attention of “The Power of Dog”, and is now making its debut on the stage-is credible and solidarity like the young Turk Meditabondo and giant, but a little too insistently WAN. Burke’s trigorino is stealthily laconic, offering each line in a shocking intonation and with the abstract expression of someone reminiscent of a dream. When he falls in love with Nina, he is curiously distanced, more hypnotized than excited. Corrin, exhibiting the same delicate balance that made Princess Diana in “The Crown” grace so, does not completely convince himself as an ambitious ingenue: this Nina is only a little too serene and acquaintance; There is no hunger there, no rawness.
Nature detests a void and Blanchett fills it with enthusiasm, with a little help from a charismatic ensemble of secondary characters. Zachary Hart is fun and brilliant as the downrodden Medvedenko, a school teacher in the original screenplay, but has reinvented herself here as a truck driver of the elevator cart. Slightly condescending, he is dressed with a football shirt to indicate that he is a working class. (The costumes are by Marg Horwell.) Jason Watkins in the role of Arkadina’s Doddering, kindly brother, Sorin; Paul Bazel as the local doctor who speaks smooth, Dorn; And Paul Higgins in the role of the manager of the Sicofanica estate, Shamayev, all have a great presence, and their idle Badinage gives the piece its distinctive comic environment. The choice of the group is Tanya Reynolds, captivating Nerd like Shamrayev’s incomprehensible daughter, Masha, who pines for Konstantin but must be satisfied with Medvedenko.
The climatic scene, in which Nina reconnects with Konstantin two years later only by breaking her heart once and for all, is disappointingly made as a melodrama not mitigated. Nina, who is now experiencing a living as a pantomime artist, semi-coherent Jbbbers; Rather than to transcend his ordeal, he seems completely defeated by it. The game ends with a tragedy and no consolation.
The set of Magda Willi is naked, but for some plastic chairs and a mass of high care that symbolizes the country estate on which these events take place. And the touches signed by ostermeier (musical blooms, microphone stand, playful violations of the fourth wall) are there from the beginning. The show opens with Hart’s Medvedenko zoom on stage on a quad bike; After dismantling, collects an electric guitar, it does a little work on the crowd and tightens a number from the English protest singer Billy Bragg. Other actors therefore emerge from the foliage and the story begins seriously. Later, it offers two other songs by Bragg.
Ostermeier directed a pause “Hamlet”, and in his 2024 interpretation of “An Enemy of the People” by Ibsen, the actors performed songs by David Bowie and Oasis. These musical flowers don’t do much to improve “the seagull”, so their inclusion here seems a little superficial. It is as if the director was imposing his style with all his heart, for branding reasons. The comedy hangs almost despite him.
Ostermeier, a terrible enfant that once tangled his feathers in his native Germany with his brazen aesthetic choices and left Zelo, embodies the artistic conflicts explored in Chekhov’s comedy. In fact, when Konstantin, delivering a line from the adapted text by Ostermeier and Macmillan, the blusters should not be “no longer cultural funding for anyone who is more than 40 years old”, echoing the provocative observation of ostermeier in this sense, made in an interview in 2001.
Does this auto-ironical self-gifteen betray a real anxiety: Ostemeier, now in the mid-1950s, creatively dying? Konstantin loses his way because his oedipal anguish is inextricably linked in his search for artistic self -knowledge; There is no way out of the loop. Ostermeier has been luckier, but his “new forms” have now ossified in orthodoxy, and it is not sure what to do with himself.
The seagull
Until April 5 at the Barbican Theater in London; Barbican.org.uk.