THE SEAGULL (2025)
THE SEAGULL, Montague Basement with Bakehouse Theatre, at KXT On Broadway. 21 November – 6 December 2025. Photography by Robert Miniter
After years of half-arsed, opportunistic “adaptations” of classics by successive Sydney ex-boy wonders, it’s difficult to feel optimistic about yet another. This time, it’s Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, and the adapter is Saro Lusty-Cavallari.
If you know and love The Seagull – fear not, you’ll love this. If you don’t know it, be happy, you’re in for a real treat. Chekhov’s cranky, bored family and friends were stuck in pre-Revolutionary Russian ennui. Lusty-Cavallari has taken them to the Northern Rivers and Bellingen during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Instead of yearning for Moscow, they sigh for Sydney.
Aspiring angry young man playwright Con (Saro Lepejian) is preparing to stage his latest work in the garden of the family getaway, beside the river. There’s a rickety cloth screen strung up above a small home-made stage at one end of the traverse space, a miscellany of chairs arrayed in front of it. On hand to rehearse and be his object of desire is Nina, an aspiring actor from across the river (Alexandra Travers).
Chief audient is Con’s mother, theatre grand dame Irene (Deborah Jones). With her is her younger Oz-Lit star boyfriend Alex (Shan-Ree Tan). Irene’s brother Peter (Tim McGarry) manages the place in her absence, but is ailing and wheezy. His friend Dorn, the local doctor (Brendan Miles), is also on hand to occupy a chair in the makeshift theatre, as is boozy Maddie (Talia Benatar); tedious, if well meaning, teacher Marty (Jason Jeffries), and Polly (Kath Gordon) Irene’s BFF, unless she’s out of favour when she’s snidely reclassified as housekeeper.
What we see of Con’s play is, at best, awful, despite poor Nina’s best efforts. The audience watches like hypnotised chooks, except for Irene, whose opinion is given forcefully and without mercy. Exit furious playwright pursued by cruel truths.
What happens over the course of two hours (including an interval) is never less than absorbing as the pandemic wreaks the havoc most of us have chosen to forget. Lives, loves, and careers are derailed, never to be the same again. Kate Beere’s set and costumes are spare and on point. Aron Murray achieves similar effects with lighting and video design.
Lusty-Cavallari’s play is as rich with human failings and sadnesses as Chekhov’s original, although subtly Australia 2020 rather than Russia 1895. Vital to Chekhov is humour – lots of it – and it’s incorporated here in the form of genuinely witty and funny jabs at present-day theatre and its luminaries. Passing mentions of Neil Armfield and Mitchell Butel, for instance, are droll and apposite, while Con’s sour grapes attitude is also deadly accurate. And it’s likely that the theatre in-jokes are out enough for the kind of educated audience that’s attracted to KXT. In any event, the happy patrons on Friday, 28 November, were clearly tickled by the comedy, while there were gasps and giggles throughout the room at the various Sydney theatre barbs.
The outcomes for the motley crew are many and varied. The ensemble is without a weak link, led by Deborah Jones’s imposing Nevin-ish grand thesp. Tim McGarry and Brendan Miles are moderately tottery and exceptionally comical as ageing country types, while Saro Lepejian makes you want to slap him or give him a cuddle, depending. Alexandra Travers, Talia Benatar and Kath Gordon make the very best of diverse portraits of put-upon womanhood and are equally excellent, as is Jason Jeffries in his grasp of being as colourful as a Fisk suit.
As a celebration of KXT’s 10th anniversary, The Seagull is a great choice and one of the best productions of its decade. One person can rarely pull off the combination of adaptor and director, never mind making it as funny and meaningful as the original. It’s a pity Andrew Upton won’t see it. Meanwhile, Sydney can: don’t delay.
