This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The seagull flies again, this time, revived, mainly with the same Game of Thrones-led cast at London’s Harold Pinter theatre as it opened with briefly before the pandemic cut short its flight.

The famous cast of Westeros includes Indira Varma as Irina Arkadina and Tom Rhys Harries as her evasive lover, Trigorin.

Broadly, there are two routes for staging Chekhov’s fine play about frailty, boredom and the drag of leisured or empty existence. The first is to indulge the lavish sweep of the “idiocy of rural life” in late-Tsarist Russia (one of Lenin’s more accurate apercus), giving us the rustle of an ageing actress’s silks, the clank of croquet warding off the tedium of an indolent summer and the deadly allure of unrequited love. The second is to allow it to deconstruct itself as a work in and about theatre — and this production is firmly on the second side.

Jamie Lloyd’s production and Anya Reiss’s adaptation dispense abruptly with the “Russianness” of the play. Irina’s snotty complaints about country-dwellers are delivered with the jaded sneer of a Chipping Norton-set resident finding herself in a rural idyll after fashionable friends have fled back to town. Clarke’s nervous fan-girl flirtation with Trigorin is cleverly written by Reiss to channel millennial-speak — lots of artful hesitations, disfluencies and air quotes to which Clarke adds the underlying tinge of Nina’s naïve opportunism.

A boring summer in the country never was quite as compelling

A tiny frame in jeans, ponytail and neat shirt (wardrobe here is definitely inflation-proof with the cast in trousers and T-shirts and even grand Irina sports a gender-fluid tunic-and-trouser ensemble). No one wears shoes, which, I guess, hints at the holiday vibe and we meet the cast sat in rows on plastic chairs (there is no curtain-up, presumably because fabric is a bourgeois distraction).

Yes, it’s all gone very rehearsal-room Brechtian: the actors have visible power packs and mics, as on a TV set and the country estate is reduced in Soutra Gilmour’s design to a plywood box, which is deconstructed in the second half to symbolise the characters’ disintegrations.

Chekhov is the ultimately adaptable playwright, not least because his fixations on the decline of life and our funny-hopeless ruses for keeping existential doom at bay feel eternally spot-on. I rather warmed to Reiss’s assured updatings of the “boring bits” of minor characters and local trivia. Instead of bemoaning the problems of the horse and carriage, they wait for late taxis to turn up and deliver a monologue about mobile phone tariffs, which sends the more sensate characters into a despairing stupor.

A certain visual and emotional stifling is the price paid in reducing a play which reflects the many ways that people present themselves to one another and how our external selves are masks to an expressionist base layer. Only Masha (a pithy Sophia Wu) carries off her Gothic depression with real “sod-you” panache.

Her love interest Konstantin (played low-key but with pathos by Daniel Monks, a disabled Australian actor) has the addition of his (real-life) limp, adding to the sense of spiritual damage even his later success cannot expel. He is unable to escape wanting to please her and hating her and himself and the tension crackles towards a disastrous conclusion.

You can feel the radical breath of Gorky and coming revolution in The Seagull and this minimalist production will bring a curious new audience to a classic which can never expire whatever becomes of the eventful Motherland. A boring summer in the country never was quite as compelling.

No such soul-searching occurs in the ocean-going musical Anything Goes, a concoction of song and dance with a plot as frothy as a 1920s silk cocktail frock.

An amorous young man lusting after a debutante, a crusty boss, an elderly dowager with an accident-prone canine plus a couple of incompetent criminals all holed up on a transatlantic cruise ship furnish the backdrop to the real point, which is lights, music and Cole Porter’s infectious verse: “Good authors too, who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words, writing prose.”

Robert Lindsay was the original star as Moonface Martin, a second-tier gangster trying to rise up the larceny charts. Denis Lawson is gentler and I missed Lindsay’s cheerily diabolical vibe. But under Kathleen Marshall’s assured direction, everyone is having a ball — from Kerry Ellis as the “dame”, Reno Sweeney, to Bonnie Langford as a marriage-hungry mama, Evangeline Harcourt. Simon Callow as the hokum cleric, Elisha Whitney, is a study in greasy piety.

In this heavy-going political and economic summer high jinks and cross-dressing tricksters feel as welcome as a cold gin martini

Some references creak a bit (not least in the bedroom farce and a Wall Street suicide joke which lands awkwardly). Some of the sharpest moments acknowledge that this is a vintage piece, with asides and nods to the artifice. “There are people watching,” hisses Reno, conspiratorially.

This outing of a musical classic has been a great bet for the Barbican — surviving the pandemic and still filling the vast auditorium over the long summer. It is, as the man said, de-lightful, de-licious and de-lovely and not de-pressing for our finances either, by comparison with the West End or Broadway. Kudos also to the Barbican for offering the young low-price tickets in decent seats for a song). In this heavy-going political and economic summer high jinks and cross-dressing tricksters feel as welcome as a cold gin martini. De-stressing indeed.