In Sydney – where theatre-makers wrestling with funding deficits and fickle audiences are obliged to generate “new work” that often feels conspicuously familiar – this take on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull lands like something intent on ruffling feathers.

Adaptor-director Saro Lusty-Cavallari has milled his own version of the script, relocating the tragicomedy to the COVID lockdowns of 2020, when live performance of every kind came to a sudden stop. Chekhov’s lakeside retreat becomes a family property on the Bellingen River in northern NSW – a refuge for Australian stage icon Irene Nicholson, her Aus-lit star boyfriend Alex Wolf, and her emerging/struggling theatre-maker son, Con.

As quarantines go, it’s enviable: loosely policed (people wander in and out), surrounded by nature, with privacy and space to make art. But it’s also a hothouse for jealousy, longing, resentment and creative paralysis.

Brendan Miles, Tim McGarry and Jason Jefferies in The Seagull. Photo © Robert Miniter

Lusty-Cavallari doesn’t just update The Seagull’s humour; he weaponises it into a sharp critique of Australian theatre’s anxieties, personalities (several named outright; most gently skewered) and enduring tropes....