The Seagull at the Barbican review: Cate Blanchett-led production is exhilarating and vital

Cate Blanchett in The Seagull (Image: Marc Brenner)

If the name Anton Chekhov gives you anxiety, like saying it out loud might expose you as under-read and uncultured, you’re not alone. At the Barbican’s radical reinterpretation of Chekhov’s The Seagull last night, this dullard kept mistaking mentions of “Tolstoy” for Toy Story.

Thankfully, this hilariously self-aware production from director Thomas Ostermeier helped me embrace creeping concerns of philistinism and laugh at myself. Not just because the modern-day setting, vaping and all, made the mistake somewhat plausible (so too the chaotic assembly of high, middle and lowbrow characters, forced by economic realities to coexist at a lake house) but because, by this point, theatreland had already been lampooned as “elitist” (often), “overpriced” (definitely in London) and “irrelevant” (never) by central character

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