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The last time Cate Blanchett starred on a London stage it was in the National Theatre’s avant-garde S&M dark comedy ‘When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other’, a strange affair that spoke of a mainstream film actor hungry to get back into the kind of weird shit that she’d never be allowed to do on screen.
This, superficially, looks like something a little more mainstream, or at least it does at first: Blanchett will star as vain, insecure actress Arkadina in Anton Chekhov’s immortal masterpiece ‘The Seagull’, with Brit actor Tom Burke as Arkadina’s writer lover Trigorin, who becomes infatuated by naive young actress Nina.
It’s a play that can be done in a very traditional way indeed – gentle melancholy, linen suits, samovars – but this production at the Barbican will be directed by Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of Berlin’s legendary Schaubuhne and eternal bad boy of the European stage; expect some provocative reinvention in his first original show for the British stage, following on from the recent English language premiere of his wildly acclaimed Berlin version of ‘An Enemy of the People’, which ran in the West End earlier this year. Like that show, the text will be be acclaimed Brit playwright Duncan Macmillan of ‘People, Places and Things’ fame.
The rest of the casting is TBC, but one thing we do know is that every production will feature over 100 tickets at £20 – get in there quick for them when public booking opens at 10am on October 9.
‘The Seagull’ is at the Barbican Centre for six weeks from February 2025, precise dates still TBC.
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