It’s one degree Celsius in central London, a biting wind coming off the Thames, and Cate Blanchett has got the jitters. She’s just finished posing for Vogue on a frosty Georgian street, and somewhere between accepting a hot-water bottle and throwing a heavy coat over the spring 2025 Carven separates she’s wearing, it strikes her: When she steps out in front of a 1,154-strong audience on the opening night of director and cowriter Thomas Ostermeier’s revival of The Seagull, it will mark her first time on stage in more than half a decade.
“How did that happen?” she asks me, seeming genuinely baffled as she folds herself into a leather armchair at the bottom of a high-rise hotel a short while later. In person, her intonation is distinctly Australian—even if her vowels have been rounded by more than 30 years of performing the Western canon’s great female roles on stage: Ophelia and Hedda, Miranda and Electra… We’re perched together just off a 6,000-square-foot ballroom, where dozens of yards of Colorama backdrops, a small department store’s worth of new-season looks, and three taxidermied seagulls have been assembled for today’s shoot. It’s a sizeable production, even by Vogue’s standards, but then there are 10 actors to photograph in roughly as many hours, each of whom is a vital ingredient in what Blanchett calls the “human soup” of the Barbican’s forthcoming Chekhov adaptation. “You can discuss a play dramaturgically and academically,” she explains, “but it really only becomes activated when everyone’s in the room”—which is why rehearsals leave her “dripping with fear and embarrassment.”
You? I ask, audibly sceptical. At 55, Blanchett has earned four BAFTAs, two Oscars, and the admiration of auteurs from Steven Spielberg to Terrence Malick, Wes Anderson to Martin Scorsese. It’s hard to believe the prospect of commanding the Barbican stage—where she delivered a virtuosic 20-minute monologue in 2012’s Groß und Klein—would fill her with anxiety, but “yes,” she insists, wrapping her cold hands around a mug of hot water and lemon, “because you don’t know if anything’s going to happen when everybody’s together—because if it doesn’t come alive, it’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing. It’s cringe.”
Given the cast in question, there’s a greater chance of those stuffed gulls flying around the ballroom than Ostermeier’s production being “cringe” when it opens this month. The first of Anton Chekhov’s four major plays—which, in the years either side of 1900, irrevocably shifted the course of modern theater—The Seagull’s plot hinges on the artistic clashes and romantic entanglements on government retiree Sorin’s (Jason Watkins) elm-shaded, lakefront dacha over two summers at the close of the 19th century. Blanchett plays Sorin’s sister, Arkadina, an aging, vain, and volatile actor, who, when the curtain rises, has just arrived from Moscow with her lover, the celebrated writer Trigorin (Tom Burke). By the water’s edge, her insecure 25-year-old son, Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee), is mounting a post-apocalyptic play in which his enduring love, ingenuous country girl Nina (Emma Corrin), can act. Nina, however, is less interested in Konstantin romantically than she is enamoured with Trigorin. Then there are those who, without much in the way of recognition, keep Sorin’s home, its temperamental resident artists, and its surrounding acres in reasonable order: estate manager Shamrayev (Paul Higgins); his long-suffering daughter, Masha (Tanya Reynolds), and longer-suffering wife, Polina (Priyanga Burford); country doctor Dorn (Paul Bazely); and local schoolmaster Medvedenko (Zachary Hart), who’s as infatuated with Masha as Masha is with Konstantin.
This is less a story of a love triangle, then, than a love polygon—but what unites The Seagull’s principal characters, beyond suffering with unrequited feelings, is a certain myopia (or, to borrow a phrase from Konstantin, the “egoism” of “ordinary mortal[s]”). “Our world’s going bankrupt,” Ostermeier—the so-called “neo-realist” director of Berlin’s Schaubühne theater—says with comical German directness when dropping by the Vogue set, a Rip Curl cap shading his eyes. “Everything’s being destroyed by our greed and overconsumption, and we’re all still preoccupied with our careers, our relationships. Who’s marrying who? Who’s divorcing who? On and on and on. It’s depressing, but—but!—the absurdity of that egocentricity, the jealousy and the vanity…” He half grimaces, half grins. “It’s also kind of hilarious, no?”
In a sense, Ostermeier’s The Seagull has been in the works since he met Blanchett 15 years ago, when she invited the director to stage his Hamlet in Sydney—a production set not in Elsinore Castle but a pile of dirt, with the Danish prince shovelling fistfuls of earth into his mouth between truncated soliloquies. It’s since traveled to some 32 cities and cemented Ostermeier’s renown as the “enfant terrible” of theatrical gesamtkunstwerks. Also brilliantly provocative: his 2024 staging of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), starring Matt Smith and soundtracked by the Clash, Oasis, and David Bowie, from which several members of The Seagull cast have been poached—namely Hart, whose role involved lobbing paint on Smith (admittedly “less fun” after Smith perforated his eardrum), and Burford (“Polina’s sexually frustrated and has no prospects, so Thomas immediately thought of me,” she deadpans).
By Ostermeier’s standards, The Seagull will be a relatively classic take on Chekhov. People, Places and Things’s Duncan Macmillan, who worked with Ostermeier on An Enemy of the People, has helped to adapt the English-language script, updating the references and foregrounding environmental collapse. This was somewhat less than welcome news to Smit-McPhee, who had read a classic translation of the play “again and again and again” while standing beside his Melbourne pool this Christmas—only to get the script and find “literally nothing was the same. Nothing! Not one word!”
Yet, “It’s really gently modernized,” Ostermeier notes—“We’re not talking about Google or whatever”—though a speech by Nina in Konstantin’s play has, in the days before the Vogue shoot, been tweaked following the cataclysmic wildfires in LA. As for the design: the Barbican stage will be virtually empty, with just a huge cyclorama “and some reeds” for dressing. “There’ll be no place to hide,” Thomas tells me. “Every production is like a journey: You never know if the water is going to last, if the car is going to break down in the middle of the desert.” Still, he says, he has every faith in his cast. “Only I can fuck it up,” he concludes, then breaks into a full-throated laugh.
If he sounds as fretful as Konstantin re: the play’s staging, consider The Seagull’s history: Its 1896 debut has gone down as one of theater’s most egregious flops. When Chekhov, a medical doctor, wrote it, he had just returned from a visit to a penal colony on Sakhalin island in eastern Russia. In comparison with the horrors he’d witnessed there, the bourgeois affairs and trials of The Seagull’s protagonists (and their real-life equivalents in Moscow) suddenly felt almost laughable. On opening night, the audience at St. Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theatre were mystified by The Seagull’s neither wholly comic nor wholly tragic tone, hissing and heckling throughout, with Chekhov fleeing from the gallery after the second act. It was only two years later, when Konstantin Stanislavski staged a more lugubrious take on The Seagull at Moscow Art Theatre, that it came to be recognized as a work of pure genius.
Ostermeier, though, has no interest in delivering yet “another melancholy, sentimental Chekhov”—the original script, as Blanchett points out, is subtitled A Comedy, after all. The Russian dramatist’s works have been a constant presence in her life: She first performed in The Cherry Orchard at drama school, and it was during a 1997 staging of The Seagull at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre that she met her playwright husband, Andrew Upton, who came to see Cate as Nina more than a dozen times. They were engaged before the run had even finished. (Besides myriad other qualities, The Seagull is also deeply romantic; Chekhov once summarized it as “four acts, a landscape… and five tons of love”.)
In Blanchett’s mind, she’s a theater actor before anything else–and no one constructs a scene quite like Chekhov. “I never, ever thought or expected to make films,” she says, thoughtfully. “When I came out of drama school, I understudied someone in a production of [Caryl Churchill’s] Top Girls [for the Sydney Theatre Company]. That was my first job. Then I ended up coming back and running the company with my husband… [At the time,] the film industry was a potent but very small industry for women who looked a certain way. I wasn’t that girl and so I just went, ‘Oh, I’m a theater actor, I guess.’” (If that sounds like Arkadina-esque delusion, it’s actually true: When she first branched into cinema via Australian New Wave films, directors called her eyes too small, her nose too big, for anything but the stage.) Then there’s the fact that Chekhovian women “change like the weather,” with Arkadina a particularly “capricious and maddening” figure, which makes her thrilling to play.
Corrin’s Nina will be similarly mercurial. The 29-year-old studied Chekhov’s plays “to death” as a student, but credits their hour-long audition with Ostermeier with banishing their “preconceptions” of Chekhov’s heroine, typically portrayed as “hopelessly naive.” “Thomas had me read a conversation with Trigorin while peeling a banana,” they recall now, tilting their head in a manner they acquired during their turn as Lady Diana Spencer in The Crown. “It completely flipped the scene on its head—made it a thousand times flirtier, a thousand times funnier—and instantly gave her the upper hand at a point when she’s meant to be blowing smoke up the ass of this famous novelist.”
Given that Corrin’s titular role in the Anna Delvey-inspired Anna X earned them an Olivier nod in 2022, expectations for their performance are high. Fortunately, they’ll have emotional support on opening night: it’s whispered their partner, Oscar winner Rami Malek, made sure he’d have an evening clear from performing Oedipus at the Old Vic to be in attendance at the Barbican.
As for Reynolds, she has every intention of playing the nicotine-addicted Masha’s histrionics as less maudlin, more humorous; this is a character who opens the original play by declaring she’s in mourning for her life and may or may not be too fond of vodka. (Ostermeier joked that the Sex Education star had gone method when she turned up to her audition with a suitcase full of rosé en route to a hen do.)
Interestingly, Thomas first proposed a one-woman take on The Seagull to Blanchett, but she refused, preferring to work with a cast she helped assemble. “The older generation has a stranglehold when it comes to cultural authority and legitimacy,” she tells me while reflecting on the play’s themes, “and younger people being starved of creative oxygen and opportunity is part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in.” At 28, Smit-McPhee is the youngest of the play’s leads—although he’s been famous since the age of 13, thanks to his turn in the blockbuster adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Seagull will mark his stage debut and he’s intrigued to see how he feels using his Australian accent for a part—everyone will speak in their natural voice throughout. (Hart, in particular, is delighted. “I’m from the Black Country,” he hoots, “and I get to say a line on the Barbican stage in my Black Country accent, in front of my Black Country parents, that goes something like: ‘You know what I’d like to see? Some straightforward play about a normal person.’”)
Like Blanchett, Burke’s conception of acting has been shaped by Chekhov; he first watched his mother, actor Anna Calder-Marshall (who famously played the Cordelia to Laurence Olivier’s Lear), as Polina at the National Theatre in his teens and has since taken in at least “a couple of Seagulls, a half-a-dozen Three Sisters, and a few Vanyas.” He’s so clearly a perfect Trigorin that his “audition” with Ostermeier largely consisted of “a long, penetrating non-verbal stare—like the beginning of a Western” and some theoretical debate re: theatrical forms. “I had dinner with David Hare last night,” he says, miming a mic drop, “and he said The Seagull was the greatest play ever—and I know what he means… Every line carries weight. That’s why it’s so momentous.”
Momentous and hilarious, Blanchett emphasizes, as she braces herself to step through the lobby’s glass-fronted doors and out into the cold. “There are days when you look at the world and feel hopeless,” she says, “but then there are days when you find the absurdity of it all hysterical. Chekhov recognized this emotional flip-flop and that’s why it’s such a relief to watch his plays in the theater. Even if you’re sitting in the dark with strangers, confronting humanity’s ridiculousness… well, at least you’re laughing together.”
The Seagull will be at the Barbican from February 26 to April 5.
In this story: hair, Mari Ohashi. Blanchett’s hair, Declan Sheils. Makeup, Marie Bruce. Blanchett’s makeup, Janeen Witherspoon. Nails, Trish Lomax. Blanchett’s nails, Robbie Tomkins. Set design, Miguel Bento. Production, North Six. Digital artwork, Imagine.