Jamie Lloyd's latest West End season was meant to run at the Playhouse, where its first show,
Cyrano de Bergerac, played in early 2020. The follow-up production of Chekhov's
The Seagull was of course a casualty of Covid, and now that it's returned its original home has been taken over by the
Kit Kat Club. So instead Lloyd has regrouped at the Pinter, home of his previous season, for a production that continues to go for the same stripped-back aesthetic, but with a very different result than
Cyrano's rap battle fireworks. Lloyd uses
Anya Reiss' 2012 version of the play, which means the setting is the Isle of Man in the present day, where frustrated young writer Konstantin (Daniel Monks) lives at his uncle Sorin's (Robert Glenister) house by a lake. If their lives are usually quiet and uneventful that's not what we see, because all four of the play's acts take place during visits from Sorin's sister, Konstantin's mother.
