Venue: KXT on Broadway (Ultimo NSW), Nov 21 – Dec 6, 2025
Playwright: Saro Lusty-Cavallari (after Anton Chekhov)
Director: Saro Lusty-Cavallari
Cast: Talia Benatar, Kath Gordon, Jason Jefferies, Deborah Jones, Saro Lepejian, Tim McGarry, Brendan Miles, Shan-Ree Tan, Alexandra Travers
Images by Robert Miniter
Theatre review
In Saro Lusty-Cavallari’s adaptation of The Seagull, the action is deftly relocated from late-19th-century Russia to the 2020 COVID lockdown in Bellingen, an idyllic township north of Sydney. Chekhov’s characters preserve their familiar longings and disappointments, and in this contemporary reframing it becomes unmistakably clear that the disillusionment of young theatrical hopefuls like Konstantin and Nina is far from an antiquated concern. Lusty-Cavallari reveals a marked vulnerability in this iteration of the classic, offering transparent glimpses of autobiography woven through an updated tale that engages meaningfully with the inner workings—and inner wounds—of Sydney’s theatre world.
Although its context is reimagined, this production maintains a striking fidelity to Chekhov’s spirit, arriving—somewhat unexpectedly—at a tone that feels almost traditional for a genre no longer in vogue. Lusty-Cavallari’s exuberant humour, threaded generously throughout, reshapes a well-worn tale of existential drift into something distinctly bittersweet, and, thankfully, thoroughly engaging and enjoyable.
Konstantin is rendered with remarkable intricacy by Saro Lepejian, who layers nuance upon nuance to create a character of great authenticity and warmth, allowing us to grasp him with unusual depth and familiarity. Alexandra Travers is equally compelling as Nina, lifting the archetype of the innocent ingénue into a figure of luminous humanity; her final scenes prove disarmingly profound and affecting under Travers’ interpretation. Also notable is Tim McGarry’s wonderfully idiosyncratic Pyotr, delivered with exquisite comic timing and an assured lightness of touch, earning some of the production’s most memorable laughs.
Kate Beere’s set and costume design provides elegant, uncluttered solutions that allow the intricate emotional dynamics to remain firmly in view. Aron Murray’s lighting is exquisitely attuned to each fluctuation in tone, guiding us seamlessly into not only the work’s dramatic intensities but also its well-timed moments of levity, which together render the production genuinely delightful.
It may feel incongruous to watch Chekhov’s characters driven to the point of shooting themselves in a contemporary Australian setting, yet the deep-seated malaise that fuels such despair remains clearly recognisable in our present moment. These upper-middle-class figures seem perpetually unable to attain what they long for, even as they dismiss what is already theirs—a conundrum that, now more than ever, echoes uncomfortably through many of our own lives.
Suzy Goes See 