“A furious, funny, deeply knowledgeable reimagining of The Seagull that skewers the Sydney theatre industry with love and exasperation in equal measure.”
Fiona Hallenan-Barker
4.5 Stars
Venue: KXT on Broadway
Sydney
Dates : Until December 6th 2025
A furious, funny, deeply knowledgeable reimagining of The Seagull that skewers the Sydney theatre industry with love and exasperation in equal measure.
Adaptor and director Saro Lusty-Cavallari attacks this question head-on in a blisteringly funny, deeply knowing, and unexpectedly moving transposition of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. And turns a play already obsessed with theatre into a work that becomes a prescient commentary on the arts, generational taste, and who gets to decide what “good theatre” looks like. Chekhov’s original play about the thwarted artistic dreams and tangled romantic longings of a group gathered at a country estate is transported to Bellingen in the early days of the pandemic. At its centre are Irene the famous actress, her son Constantine, the tortured young playwright, and Nina, the aspiring actor whose hopes are both ignited and extinguished by the world she longs to enter.
This is The Seagull reimagined by someone who has lived intimately with the classics, postmodern drama, and the British “in-yer-face” movement of the ’90s. But is also unapologetically steeped in the Sydney theatre ecosystem. Lusty-Cavallari’s adaptation is equal parts homage and gleeful provocation. The jokes land because they’re written by someone who has witnessed quite a bit and isn’t afraid to bite the hand that feeds. The name-dropping glitter bomb that explodes throughout the play works because if you know, you know; and if you don’t, the characters and world of Covid lockdowns are so richly inhabited that it never matters.
Lusty-Cavallari sharpens Chekhov’s intergenerational rifts into something both amusingly petty and painfully precise. The younger characters flex their theatrical literacy with a kind of bored brilliance, rolling their eyes at “the same old, same old”. The staging a play-within-a-play that expertly skewers the old guard of theatre in order to parody a certain school of theatre-making, is actually an exquisitely sophisticated version of it, and the result is hysterical. Alexandra Travers brings bright-eyed fragility to Nina, her eventual unravelling more devastating for the way she tries to hold it together. Talia Benatar’s sardonic Maddie seems to have wandered straight out of a gothic play so bleakly comic it feels ripped from the darkest pages of a Sarah Kane. Her unrequited love for Con twists her into shapes at once pitiable and ferocious, and every time poor school teacher Marty dares approach (played with pitch-perfect bruised sincerity by Jason Jefferies), she pushes him further into the dirt and adds a kick for good measure.
Saro Lepejian is the superbly tortured Con, Irene’s hot headed, idealist son, armed with an earring, a cool haircut, and a catalogue of astute, furious observations about the theatre industry. He is vigorous and vibrating with the kind of outraged conviction only a twenty-something can sustain without spontaneously combusting. His monologue, complete with digs at well-known directors using gimmicky gender-bending tragic heroes or shoving cameras where no camera should go, is one of the funniest and most lacerating moments of the night.
The older generation, meanwhile, carries their cultural capital like armour. Deborah Jones’s Irene is all ego and no tenderness, a narcissist who cannot fathom the shrinking relevance of her own stardom. Counterbalanced by Kath Gordon’s Polly, downtrodden and nostalgic for her university days, their friendship is a prickly, toxic seesaw of loyalty and resentment. Shan-Ree Tan lends his mellifluous voice to the vacuous Alex Wolf, the fishing mad bourgeois podcaster that does very little and has the women fawning over him. Brendan Miles gives the production its emotional ballast with his sensitive, humane Dr Dorn, while Tim McGarry’s Peter is a masterclass in controlled emotion and larrikin vulnerability. Together they are like sage schoolboys watching from the sidelines.
Kate Beere’s set and costume design evokes a lush, lascivious North Coast holiday vibe on a shoestring budget. The traverse configuration is a gift: audience members get to watch each other watching the show, particularly the younger theatregoers who don’t know the play and whose reactions become part of the experience. The hammock-laden garden scene is beautifully staged; bodies delicately arranged in a tiny space. The final study scene is equally striking. Across the night, the company pulls off large ensemble pictures that should not fit in a venue this small. And yet they do.
Screens and video design by Aron Murray enhance the production without overwhelming it, used first to give the show a youthful digital vibrancy, and later to devastating effect as technology itself “deletes” the world we’ve been living in. It is meta-theatre executed with precision and care. This adaptation is not the love letter to theatre that Chekhov wrote. It is a rail against the machine by someone who sits inside that very machine, crafting jokes about institutions, gatekeepers, and privilege while simultaneously relying on them for oxygen. It asks, with humour and bite: What does it mean to gather people in a space and tell a story?
This is a production that could easily be toured nationally and set in Daylesford or the Barossa. It is sharp, funny, astute, and profoundly contemporary. Montague Basement are ones to watch; if they’re not careful, they’ll find themselves on our main stages very soon. Take your friends. Take some young people who think theatre is boring. Take yourself! You won’t see anything this smart, this alive, or this acutely observed for a while.
Fiona Hallenan-Barker, Theatre Now
