Home

Written by Anton Chekhov. Adapted by Saro Lusty-Cavallari. Montague Basement in association with Bakehouse Theatre. KXT on Broadway. 21 Nov – 6 Dec, 2025.

For a nearly 130-year-old play, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is looking pretty spry in the new Australian adaptation now on stage at KXT on Broadway. It’s funny, cutting, and somehow meta-but-not-meta in its commentary on the Sydney theatre scene. I’ll be honest: I cringed at the thought of Covid-set Chekhov, but this may be the first genuinely good pandemic-adjacent play I’ve seen — and also one of the best adaptations of The Seagull. Hats off to everyone involved; this one’s a keeper.

Cast your mind back to March 2020, as Covid locks down Australia for the first time (and, coincidentally, the month I moved back to Australia — but this isn’t about me). Beloved Australian actress Irene Nicolson (Deborah Jones) retreats to her family property along the Bellingen River. She’s joined by her lover Alex (Shan-Ree Tan), a noted author; her son Constantin (Saro Lepejian), a moody young artist in the making; and her brother Peter (Tim McGarry), who completes this accidental bubble of creatives.

Between glasses of pinot gris and BBQs by the water, small tensions begin to take root. When Constantin brings his girlfriend Nina (Alexandra Travers) to stage his avant-garde backyard play, events start to snowball just as Covid cases rise around the country. The question becomes: will this enforced proximity of middle-class artists spark a masterpiece, or just more chaos?

Writer-director Saro Lusty-Cavallari’s script is steeped in local theatre history, and the satire is delicious. It lovingly takes pot-shots at Sydney’s theatrical establishment while also skewering the younger generation pushing, often frustratedly, against long-standing conventions. As Irene name-drops colleagues and venues from across her career, it’s like scrolling through three decades of Australian theatre contacts.

Meanwhile, as Constantin rails against “the system,” Lusty-Cavallari gets to have his cake and eat it too — using Con to voice the criticisms of those who’ve struggled to break onto our main stages, while also allowing us to laugh at them. It’s a rich vein of comedy that brings Chekhov’s scenario vibrantly to life, making this one of the funniest adaptations I’ve seen.

I was almost disappointed there wasn’t a sly nod to STC’s fateful 2023 production of The Seagull, which caused so much needless commotion and cost the company dearly (maybe there was and I just missed it). Still, the humour isn’t there just to wink at us; it opens broader questions about art, authenticity, and the pretensions baked into a form we all keep coming back to.

Moving the action to the early days of the pandemic works far better than expected. It gives the characters a believable reason to be trapped together — and a justification for some of their more extreme decisions. Perhaps it’s the distance of a few years, or maybe the show’s lightness of touch, but the references to that traumatic time don’t sting the way they often have in other Covid-era plays.

More importantly, the adaptation speaks to the present as much as the past. The emotional divide between the weary, established older generation and the frustrated younger cohort feels sharply contemporary. As Nina, Constantin, and Maddie (Talia Benatar) search for a place in a world that seems poorly designed for them, their tragedies feel all too familiar — and all too real.

A terrific cast and a first-rate script make the 2 hr 20 min running time fly by. It’s not every production that earns a round of applause barely 15 minutes in, but Lusty-Cavallari’s The Seagull hits a sweet spot for Sydney theatregoers. It balances levity and depth with impressive ease — a remarkable achievement.

N.B. A warm “Happy Birthday” to KXT on their 10th anniversary. This show is a superb way to step into your second decade.

Written by Edward Albee. GWB Entertainment & Andrew Henry Presents the Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre production. Sydney Theatre Company. Roslyn Packer Theatre. 7 Nov – 14 Dec, 2025.

It’s back — the most caustic of all domestic comedies. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf returns to Sydney with its jagged wit and diabolically broken relationships, brought to the stage by real-life married couple Kat Stewart and David Whiteley.

George (Whiteley) and Martha (Stewart) return home from a faculty party filled with minor complaints. You were too loud. You were too quiet. You weren’t funny. They settle into their tired, drunken bickering routine as George makes Martha a nightcap. But it won’t be a nightcap. Martha has invited a nice young couple they met – Nick (Harvey Zielinski) and Honey (Emily Goddard) – over to keep the party going. Why? Does she just want to humiliate George further? Or is there something more to the games they’re both playing?

I’ll lay my cards on the table early and say that I think Albee’s script is near perfect. It’s a finely tuned machine of subtext, competing motivations, and carefully dropped hints. Yes, the three-hour-plus running time is intimidating. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a single line you’d want to cut. The emotional fever builds carefully over the course of the play, and it would break the rhythm to tinker with Albee’s work. More than sixty years on, it remains a modern masterpiece.

If Albee’s text is a masterclass in structure, his characters are a study in complex, competing motivations and emotional drives. George and Martha are the culmination of decades of slights, frustrations, and dead dreams – middle-aged people who feel too much and can only numb themselves with liquor.

Their world is a sick microcosm of insular jokes and stories only they truly understand. Like an online conspiracy theorist cut off from regular society, they’re losing touch with the real world and retreating into their dysfunctional private hell. You know they’ve had this exact fight before, yet there’s some strange comfort in the repetition – they understand one another completely and that is its own sort of intimacy. It’s only when George changes the game that the true horror settles in.

Kat Stewart is invigorating as the academic’s housewife clawing at the walls of her middle-class existence. She brings a feline grace and simmering rage to Martha as she stalks the stage – the world is ignoring her but she is demanding its attention.

While Stewart has rightly been highly praised, I found myself drawn more to Whiteley’s viciously professorial and quick-witted performance. His George is an example of masterfully pitched tone. There’s a menace to his delivery – a sense that George is playing multiple games at once – but that cerebral element never outweighs the emotional drive, the pain, that pushes him forward. Watching these two together is the stuff theatrical dreams are made of. This is gold.

As the younger academic couple, Nick and Honey, Zielinski and Goddard at first seem miscast – neither fitting the physical descriptions given in the script. But their performances quickly dispel any doubts, especially Goddard, who has the hardest role to balance as a more traditionally comedic figure. Under Sarah Goodes’ direction, she lands her moments without breaking the tone.

All of this comes together under Goodes’ steady hand. She has doubled down on the emotional horror of the story, adding short, ethereal interludes that strengthen the ongoing mystery surrounding George and Martha’s “kid”. As the audience is left to guess how much of what they’re saying is truth and how much is bitter fiction, these moments tease us further.

Harriet Oxley’s design is both spacious and stifling, placing George and Martha’s bar centre stage – there’s no forgetting their lives revolve around alcohol. There are beautiful subtleties in Matt Scott’s lighting and in Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter’s sound design (even if one cue felt slightly overused).

This production has grown from Melbourne’s 80-seat Red Stitch Actors Theatre, where it debuted in 2023, to the expanded, full-scale version we see today. These actors have had time to settle into their roles and live with these complex characters – and it shows. The production has already received near-universal acclaim, and it’s clear to see why. Unlike the 2022 production staged at the Sydney Opera House (which I missed, but multiple sources say was a bit of a drag), this version rises to the challenge of the text.

Make no mistake: this is a heavy night at the theatre. As funny as it is watching two people tear each other apart with wit and venom, it’s also a journey into alcoholism and emotional abuse – and, strangely, at the end of the day, a twisted love story. At three hours twenty minutes, including two short intervals (you’ll be racing to either use the loo or get to the bar – good luck doing both), it makes for an intense evening, especially on a school night. But, for my money, it doesn’t get much better than this.