KXT on Broadway, November 26
8/10
This is Chekhov’s The Seagull not so much adapted as recooked. The characters remain recognisable despite some renaming, and the story’s intact despite being set in Bellingen during Covid. The big change of ingredient is the dialogue, but even that remains close to the original’s spirit.
Despite ending with a suicide, the play was penned as a comedy, with Chekhov satirising age and class distinctions and – like holding up a mirror and drawing a caricature of himself on it with a crayon – the pretensions of theatricals. Would-be playwright Konstantin decries the hidebound conventions of theatre at the time, and here writer/director Saro Lusty-Cavallari delights in having his Constantine rip into the fabric of Sydney theatre and its protagonists.
In fact, between Constantine’s petulant rancour the gossipy grudges of his mother, the famed actor Irene (previously Arkadina), Lusty-Cavallari drops a truckload of steaming mockery on Sydney’s theatre scene, from its loftiest names to its indie quirks. But, like Chekhov (and however heated Constantine becomes), he satirises with some affection rather than with pure contempt. Chekhov might have especially relished Lusty-Cavallari’s lampooning himself as “a bearded playwright stealing from the classics, and calling it new Australian writing”.
His robust cast includes Deborah Jones feasting upon Irene, with her stylish hair, large sunglasses, permanent glass of wine, toffee accent and bulldozing self-obsession; one that sweeps all before it, including her son’s sense of his place in the world.
Saro Lepejian blazes as Constantine, for whom every nuance of art, culture, love and social intercourse is a life-and-death matter. Tim McGarry (Irene’s witty older brother, Peter) and Brendan Miles (the doctor) shine, their characters now two ageing Bellingen hippies, dope-smoking their way through the lockdown, with the doctor the most benign of a scrambled tribe.
Shan-Ree Tan plays Irene’s beau, the famed author Alex, with a delicious mix of urbane pomposity, predatory charm and a whisper of self-doubt. Talia Benatar sinks her teeth into bad girl Maddie, so lovelorn over Constantine as to be drinking beer for breakfast. Kath Gordon is also good as Maddie’s embittered mother, Polly, Irene’s “help”, and Jason Jeffries is the dull school teacher, Marty, whom Maddie marries out of boredom.
Finally, Alexandra Travers plays Nina, who performs in Constantine’s grotesquely over-written – “post-dramatic” – backyard play, Eros in Plastic, and who, unable to return Constantine’s love, falls for Alex. She, too, excels, until act four, when she returns from her failed affair, miscarriage and jobbing-actor career. Now, when Lusty-Cavallari switches tone from cavorting satire to emotional desperation, neither his writing nor Travers’ performance quite ring true, and after so much of the play delighting, the ending is dissatisfying.
The production, astutely blocked in the traverse space, and with amusingly choreographed changes of designer Kate Beere’s settings, marks the 10th birthday of Kings Cross Theatre, a vital piece in the puzzle of Sydney theatre.
Until December 6.
https://www.kingsxtheatre.com/the-seagull
https://events.humanitix.com/the-seagull-2025