The Seagull review – Cate Blanchett and an all-star ensemble take wing

Chekhov described his country-house drama as a comedy, creating its serious yet silly characters “not without pleasure”. Still, it is a test of tone and performance to render, with humour, a story that scales so much thwarted life.

Director Thomas Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan’s new version rather magically balances lightness, wit and melancholy from the off, as characters gather at a country estate in hipsterish modern dress. There is the imperious actor Arkadina (Cate Blanchett) and her lover, Trigorin (Tom Burke), a famous writer who arrives from the city; her brother Sorin (Jason Watkins), whose health is failing, and her overshadowed son, Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who aspires to be a writer and, in protest perhaps, disapproves of the middlebrow appeal of his mother’s art. Love’s arrows shoot in all the wrong directions and every cast member reflects the pain of injury alongside the laughs.

Excellence, integrity, depth … Tom Burke and Emma Corrin. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Blanchett may be the glitteriest of castings but this is a powerhouse ensemble that first matches and then outshines her in intensity. Her Arkadina is an actor off-stage, too, her fame an act of will in this household, and she pulls out the emotional theatrics to circumvent pain . The mother of a complicated son, she expresses worry over his first suicide attempt but greater concern that she might be getting a cold-sore.

The idea is that she finds real life and her real self impossible to face but it means you are kept at a remove in her most critical moments. Her clashes with Konstantin break through this veneer but she quickly returns to her one-woman cabaret act, tap dancing at one point, and Blanchett brings some bawdy outre fun. There is the same distance with several others in the cast who play both their character and the role of an actor, but this does not impede their most charged moments in the same way.

Burke’s Trigorin is excellent – a covert narcissist whose humblebrags are so convincing, his self-centredness so entitled, that even his explanations for infidelity seem reasonable. “I’m a vampire,” he says of himself as a writer, but he is the same as a lover.

Watkins lifts the minor part of Sorin and starts off as the best of the cast’s sad clowns, travels further into melancholy with his sense of having lived the wrong life – and then reaches the terrible realisation that it has not been lived at all. Smit-McPhee, in his stage debut, exudes emo-angst and rage towards Arkadina with some killer putdowns of her gen X failings. Emma Corrin, as Nina, brings immense integrity and depth.

The play’s love triangles are beautifully accomplished and full of intensity, humour bringing a contrapuntal energy to the characters’ sadness. Tanya Reynolds makes Masha indulgently love-lorn at the start, clearly in mourning over her unrequited love for Konstantin, yet there is such resigned heartache too that her trajectory with Medvedenko (Zachary Hart, excellent) – whom she marries as a substitute – is tragic.

“Who wants a bit of Chekhov?” asks Hart, with a guitar slung around his neck. There is an overt sense of performance throughout, which is fitting for a play that grapples with questions about the purpose of art and the value of theatre in a time of crisis. Sometimes coming precipitously close to polemic, it swerves into ruefulness, just about dodging cliche.

Magnetic … Jason Watkins and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Photograph: Marc Brenner

A semi-thrust stage brings intimacy but sometimes there are too many techniques at work, bearing the strained theatricality of the “new forms” that Konstantin is keen to discover. What is remarkable is that these characters are made likable, even lovable. You feel for each of them.

Magda Willi’s set design for the Barbican’s huge stage leaves much empty space, with a comical clump of shrubbery at the centre along with folding deckchairs. It feels incongruous but becomes a clever metaphor for characters who feel so stranded within the expanse of the Russian countryside.

The music works in interesting ways too, bringing irony in the romantic scenes (The Stranglers’ Golden Brown is repeatedly used). Sometimes reminiscent of Benedict Andrews’ supreme reinterpretation of The Cherry Orchard last year at the Donmar Warehouse, it is perhaps not as transformative. But it is no less magnetic, from the shifts within characters to the shift of tone in the last, dark act. A masterfully handled comedy where Chekhov’s gun sounds the tragic final note.

• At the Barbican theatre, London, until 5 April