The week in theatre: The Seagull; Punch – review

Fresh from the seaside, I went in warily to Thomas Ostermeier’s production of The Seagull. How could that bird be an image of vulnerability, when on today’s beaches gulls are predators, strutting like bankers, swooping on passersby? What’s more, it is so hard to pull off the crucial scene in which Nina – betrayed by her lover, her ambitions in ruins – flaps desolately around calling herself a seagull. Tragedy often looks like histrionics. Which raises the question of why critics suspect the celebrated actor Arkadina of inauthenticity because of her profession, while Nina, the failed actor, is considered to be simply sincere.

And yet in this new adaptation by Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan, Chekhov’s 1896 drama brims with interest, even when snatched brutally into the present: sun loungers! Quad bikes! This is the best ever play about writers, and a real quizzing of drama. Even better, as David Hare, the author of a very good version, has argued, it’s a play about change and struggle, in which theatre is “only the metaphor”.

Time and again, The Seagull is an engine for extraordinary performances. Cate Blanchett is a magnetic and maddening Arkadina. Full of allure and affectation, she gives not so much a portrait of a bad actor as of bad actoriness: leaping in a purple boiler suit; doing the splits (applause from the audience) in glitter trousers; tap dancing, flinging herself to the ground, fidgeting and rustling papers when the spotlight is on someone else.

Yet, in the best Chekhov tradition, there is no single spotlight. Almost every character has a moment when the stage takes on the colour of their personality, though I wish they did so without seizing one of the too-ubiquitous mics: the text is diminished by amplification. Emma Corrin, with Peter Pan candour, makes Nina unusually dangerous as well as artless. At the moment when most under the spell of the dramatist Trigorin (a stiff-with-self-regard Tom Burke), Nina slaps him: exactly how an uncertain young girl might overreact. As Masha, Tanya Reynolds has no trace of ornamental melancholy: she is truly depressed, sunk-shouldered in a droopy long skirt, vaping. And Jason Watkins – with bad shorts and a blue supermarket plastic bag – is a wily, funny, heart-wrenching Sorin.

Tom Burke as a ‘stiff-with-self-regard’ Trigorin, with Emma Corrin as Nina. Photograph: Marc Brenner

I saw a transcendent production in 2007, directed by Ian Rickson, with Kristin Scott Thomas as Arkadina (both were there on this press night). On Hildegard Bechtler’s Royal Court set – dark wood and gull colours – Carey Mulligan flew high as Nina, alongside Mackenzie Crook and Chiwetel Ejiofor. No production has surpassed that for me, but this utterly different vivacity at the Barbican is proof of the morphing, soaring power of The Seagull.

It is extraordinary, the gathering force of Punch. How it begins as a singular history and ends as a universal statement. How – as the theatre is uniquely equipped to do – it actually incarnates change.

This is a 2024 Nottingham Playhouse production of a real-life Nottingham story. Who better to write it than James Sherwood Graham, who grew up in Nottinghamshire. And who better to spell out the nationwide implications than Graham, whose football-as-portrait-of-a-country play Dear England has just arrived in an updated version at the National. Actually, more than nationwide: Adam Penford’s production of Punch goes to Broadway this autumn.

‘A career-making performance’: David Shields and company in Punch. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Based on Jacob Dunne’s autobiographical memoir Right from Wrong (2022), Punch is a history of casual violence and catastrophic consequence. As a teenager high on drugs and gang pressure, Dunne lands an unmotivated punch on a stranger and ends up imprisoned for manslaughter. Yet it is also a story of repair. A few years after his incarceration, Dunne has a degree, a family and a sense of purpose. Under the auspices of the restorative justice process, he has been brought together with the dead man’s devastated parents. Together, though always shadowed, they have begun to understand each another.

To convince, the history needs gradual, delicate unfolding. Penford gives it the right pace: as if we were watching in real time. Though the evening begins with some over-jittery choreography, and though the social message is heavily underlined, tremendous acting provides a sense of things being held always in a tremulous balance. The puncher says: “I didn’t mean it.” His victim’s father observes that a punch is not an accident.

David Shields puts in a career-making performance as the young man. He is at first beside himself: fidgety-limbed, his speech a string of blurred sounds that don’t always coalesce into words, his words only sometimes reaching towards sense. Slowly he comes into focus: tighter mentally, physically, emotionally. As the victim’s mother, Julie Hesmondhalgh is remarkable. Though utterly forthright, her performance is full of small, self-deprecating, what-am-I-like gestures that you might think would register only in closeup. She makes comedy and hesitation betray the tangle of her feelings. Looking for the word “punitive” she comes up with “Pontefract”; she stumbles over the word “restorative”. Tony Hirst is impressive as her husband: steadily sorrowful, kind, unforgiving. She is in a furry dressing gown, he in chunky cable knit. Alec Boaden makes a memorable stage debut.

There is a strong, overtly stated social message about the waste of life here: why, one character asks, do people understand that, left to themselves, potholes will turn into gaping holes, but fail to recognise that cracks in humans and their circumstances will turn into abysms. Punch persuades us that this need not be so.

Star ratings (out of five)
The Seagull ★★★★
Punch ★★★★

• The Seagull is at the Barbican theatre, London, until 5 April

• Punch is at the Young Vic, London, until 26 April