by What is the meaning of the theater? The question is that director Thomas Ostermeier – once the enfant terrible theater, who, as is well known, said that the directors should stop working over 40 o’clock – to work with this narrow, self -referential and spectacular production of Chekhov’s game over theater.
Oh, and it has a performance of Cate Blanchett, which may be the best of the year.
“Who wants a little Czecher?” Zachary Harts dirty exaggerated Medvedmenko asks when he leaves a Billy Bragg number on the guitar. Oh god, it will be Cool Czechow? Well, one kind, but Ostermeier also takes the piss.
Yes, he accidentally has actor to microphones, some of which speak directly to the audience, others don’t seem to know that we are there. But with Duncan Macmillan’s new – largely loyal, often very nice adaptation, it becomes a blow between the traditional and carried out seagulls that were carried out as contemporary theater and could not slide between the two and could not settle.
We also get this from Magda Willis Set: Realist and Abstract in a, with a thicket of high wheat stems in the middle of the stage, where the actors appear magical, surrounded by a curved empty wall.
The Great Arkadina (Blanchett) is an eggy Hollywood actress, Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a frustrated Nepo baby author who cannot escape the shadow of his attention, while Trigor is a writer who brings herself on the same shelf as Ian McEwan. With great humor, but above all, great complexity, Ostermeier Chekhov’s long Love Centipede (Medvedenko loves Masha loves Konstantin loves Nina loves trregorin etc.).
You wonder who channeled your Hollywood colleagues Blanchett here: Snippy, Haghty, Eye rolling, all a big gesture, all a performance. She radiates the claim as if she had made the absolute assumption that everyone loves. Your Arkadina cannot stop acting. Each line is an aria, a song-and-dance moment. Some of the speeches broke out into a song, even the dance dance – at some point she makes the divisions. She is never able to deal with the person with whom she speaks because she always plays in the gallery.
They keep thinking because all the characters face their billing that the tank will crack, but it never does. Even when she asks her lover not to leave her for a 20-year-old girl, it is still a performance. She roams her waist, waxed on the floor, cries. “You think I play?” She cries with Trigorin. Yes, is the answer. It is an immensely qualified performance of Blanchett to behave like this and to do it in so many different ways.
This could not be a contrast to Tom Burke’s originally gnomical trigorin, who almost disappears in the first scenes he is on stage. Where Blanchett turns everything around the audience, Burke is turned inside, his words of motherie and almost blurred. You would almost feel pity with him if he didn’t feel it so much for himself.
But everyone here is really brilliant: from Jason Watkins’ adorable invalid Peter, who wears a small pillow with him, wherever he goes to Emma Corrins to loyal, ninity.
It is as if you can see Ostermeier with yourself through these characters about what theater should be, especially if you are closer to the stuffy older generation that are depicted in it than the radical younger ones.
In the middle of the self -flagellation of the characters – most of them moan about how miserable they are and how they wasted their lives – the piece themselves themselves: talk about how the theater is overpriced, indulgent and is not relevant for something in real life.
With lights that hardly go down and actors who are apparently able to see us sitting there, it is difficult not to feel aware of yourself as an audience. Why exactly did we pay all this money to see a three-hour self-pity party? Does it make sense to observe a piece of art and love when the world is so terrible?
This is what the production in your own skin is so uncomfortable, so unhappy to do what it does, but on the way to an exquisite piece of theater that becomes an answer to his own questions.
The seagull is in the Barbican until April 5th
