Theatre review: The Seagull

Hot on the heels of a Three Sisters that found a bit more humour than usual in one of the bleaker Chekhovs comes a Seagull that focuses on the melancholy of one of the ones that's officially a comedy. Duncan Macmillan and director Thomas Ostermeier's adaptation keeps all four acts in the al fresco location where only the first usually takes place: The lakeside dacha of retired civil servant Peter Sorin (Jason Watkins,) whose insistence that the fresh country air doesn't agree with him helps him and everyone else ignore just how bad his health actually is. Spending the summer there as usual is his sister Irina Arkádina (Cate Blanchett,) a famous actress, with her new boyfriend Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke,) a bestselling novelist. But we begin with Arkádina's son Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee,) an aspiring playwright who's premiering an experimental play he's convinced is the future of art.

Theatre review: Gross und Klein

Sydney Theatre Company's production of Botho Strauss' Gross und Klein is subtitled with the English translation of the title, Big and Small, a subtitle that's been getting bigger in the publicity as the months went on, presumably to avoid disappointment from people expecting a cop show featuring the mismatched partnership of Paul Gross from Due South and underpant merchant Calvin Klein. Instead it's a slice of 1970s German expressionism, modernised in a translation by Martin Crimp. Lotte is on a journey, starting on holiday in Morocco before returning to Germany. She drops in on other people's lives, finding all their little pronouncements, from pearls of wisdom to tedious management-speak "amazing!" She moves into an apartment block where everyone wanders in and out of each other's flats at whim, and a girl lives permanently in a tent. She joins her brother's family at a bizarre garden party, starts dating a man then plays at being his secretary, and preaches Kabbalah to a man at a bus stop. And there we have it.