She leads an impressive cast including Tom Burke and Emma Corrin in avant-garde director Thomas Ostermeier’s cracking modern take on Chekhov
Last spring, Thomas Ostermeier, the directorial darling of avant-garde European theatre, made his West End debut with a laborious modern spin on Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, starring Matt Smith as a type of grouchy perennial student. Now Ostermeier is back, to take on Chekhov rather than Ibsen, and with an even bigger name as his star attraction: Cate Blanchett, who absolutely blazes through the role of hollow and self-obsessed actress Irina Arkadina.
This time, Ostermeier has sensibly enlisted a native English-speaking writer – Duncan Macmillan – to work with him on the adaptation and the result is a cracker. The language and the costumes might be fiercely contemporary, but the masterful setting and characters are 100 per cent Chekhov.
On a rundown country estate miles from anywhere, a tight-knit group of family, friends and assorted hangers on are drowning in depression, engulfed by existential ennui and stuck in a thankless domino row of unrequited love. Even the person at the end of this chain, narcissistic writer Trigorin (Tom Burke) whose premier object of affection is himself, seems disappointed by the return he is getting from his beloved.
Compelling as the Chekhovian action is once we get to it, Ostermeier still makes us sit through a performer riding about on a quad bike, playing a Billy Bragg song on the guitar and asking us “Who wants a bit of Chekhov?” Quite what this adds is anyone’s guess, but once we’re in the midst of these lives wasting away with every heartbeat, it’s ferocious. Arkadina’s frustrated playwright son Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – the mother-son dynamic is vicious – launches into a tirade against the pointlessness of (his mother’s sort of) theatre, an “obsolete distraction”.
In an intriguing continuation of this strand of self-reflexiveness, Arkadina’s lover Trigorin later embarks on an epic monologue about how “We need Nelson Mandelas, Volodymyr Zelenskys: art has never been less relevant”. This is Ostermeier’s deliberately provocative comment about our current unstable world order – and yet of course here we sit in a theatre, fascinated, watching an ensemble of fine performers portray an assortment of writers and actors. For an obsolete and irrelevant art form, theatre’s doing pretty decently.
A patch of very tall green crops grows in the centre of the Barbican’s sensibly curtailed playing space and Blanchett’s Arkadina, a grandstanding grand dame in a purple jumpsuit, commands it all, a continual whirl of performative emotion encasing an empty centre. There’s lovely work too from Emma Corrin as would-be actress Nina, a young woman with an otherworldly sparkle that veers dangerously close to highly strung disintegration.
Tanya Reynolds impresses too as the dejectedly lovelorn Masha, dressed in the dullest and droopiest clothes imaginable. As ever in Chekhov, loyal retainers get ignored or left behind while the principal players go through their never-ending crises. The evening’s big winner, pace the in-play naysayers, is theatre itself.
To 5 April, Barbican Theatre, London (theseagullplay.co.uk)