Seagull: True Story review — Alexander Molochnikov’s fever dream in exile

Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.

A goldfish in a bowl, a son on the run, a mother on the phone with Wagner’s emissaries — Alexander Molochnikov’s Seagull: True Story wastes no time plunging from the absurd to the terrifying. Now at Marylebone Theatre after a debut at New York’s La MaMa, it is part memoir, part cabaret, part stand-up — with the potential of being a musical.

It is unusual to open a review by listing who was in the stalls, but here the audience was part of the drama — a cross between a political exile roll call and a pre-war society column, mirroring the play’s own collision of Russian reality and the American dream. Moscow It-girls, freshly back from their Sardinian and south of France dachas, sat alongside Alexander Rodnyansky — once the powerful head of Russia’s STS network, later producer of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes-lauded Leviathan and Loveless. Now a Ukrainian citizen, outspoken in his support of Kyiv and father to a senior adviser in Zelensky’s government, he found himself in the same audience as Ksenia Sobchak — Russia’s former answer to Paris Hilton: a reality-TV star, presidential candidate, and daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the St Petersburg mayor under whom Putin began his rise. Her politics have long been ambiguous, if not opportunistically fluent. Nearby sat Alexandra Tolstoy, writer and horse-trekking adventurer, and former partner of Sergei Pugachev, the oligarch at one time widely dubbed “Putin’s banker”, along with Natalya Sindeyeva, founder of Russia’s opposition TV Rain, and Natasha Zinko, the Ukrainian fashion designer whose work has been shown at London Fashion Week. Add in Isla Fisher, and the audience itself was a clash of exiles, celebrities and survivors — as strange a mix as the stage itself.

The venue carried its own symbolism. Marylebone Theatre has leaned into protest programming before — The White Factory, a play centered on a textile plant in Nazi-occupied Łódź and the Jewish genocide it concealed, came up during the first wave of Gaza protests; The Last Word — a performance built around the spoken testimonies of Russian political prisoners branded “foreign agents” — was performed when talk turned to cutting aid for Ukraine.

The story begins in Moscow

Photos by Mark Senior

Written by the American playwright Eli Rarey and directed by Alexander (Sasha) Molochnikov, Seagull: True Story follows Konstantin — or Kon — a young director on the eve of his Moscow premiere of Seagull, who finds himself pushed into exile, carrying little more than a suitcase and a goldfish named Anton.

Some parallels with Molochnikov’s life are obvious enough, though Kon is as much fantasy as reflection: the figure he wants to be — fearless, uncompromising — and the one he fears becoming, irrelevant and self-pitying.

Konstantin posts a hesitant anti-war video. It is little more than a plea, yet his mother Olga — played by Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė with chilling composure — receives a call from Wagner emissaries, representatives of Russia’s mercenary army, warning that his flat has already been marked. Dapkūnaitė, a Lithuanian actress with credits in Burnt by the Sun, Mission: Impossible and Hannibal Rising, is a major presence in both European cinema and international theatre, having performed at the Old Vic and Hampstead Theatre.

Draped in fur and stilettos, Olga delivers the threat with icy restraint — a commanding matriarch shielding her son the only way she knows how: with compromise and connections.

She insists on a public apology before the premiere. Instead, Konstantin flees — passport and change of clothes hastily packed — bound for America via Istanbul, the same route now familiar to thousands of Russians under sanctions.

On the day of the premiere his dramaturg and friend Anton (Elan Zafir) reads Konstantin’s real statement aloud: unapologetic, defiant — but already spoken from the relative safety of exile. Anton pays the price, beaten and sent to a prison camp somewhere in Siberia. If Olga is the voice of pragmatism, Anton is the voice of conscience.

The swirl around him is driven by Andrey Burkovskiy, who opens the show as a whip-smart master of ceremonies. With manic charm he sets the rhythm, veering from sardonic cheer to sly menace in the space of a breath. At one point he rattles through a one-sentence summary of Chekhov’s Seagull — Treplev in love, Nina in love with someone else, his mother an actress, he shoots himself, “that’s it” — reducing a cultural touchstone to a comic shrug.

By his early thirties, director Molochnikov was a darling of Moscow’s theatre establishment, directing at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre and even the Bolshoi — the kind of golden boy many in the London audience had once admired at home. He left Russia in 2022 not with a suitcase and a goldfish, like Kon, but on a plane to New York to study at Columbia University, cushioned by an American passport through his stepfather, once part of the New York Times’s Moscow bureau. Yet the erasures converged. In real life, Molochnikov’s name was quietly removed from the posters of 19.14 at the Moscow Art Theatre. In the play, Kon learns from his mother that his Moscow premiere has gone ahead — but his name has been replaced by the single word “Director.”

Exile and illusion

Photos by Mark Senior

In the second act, Konstantin is now simply Kon: the name, the stature, even the voice diminished. Daniel Boyd plays him in a zip-up track jacket, funny and restless, always on the brink of a breakdown or a breakthrough, clinging to a goldfish in a bowl — his only silent witness in exile. He is taken in by Nico (Stella Baker), an alluring dreamer who shares her warehouse commune with other artists scraping by. She first appears in torn tights and heavy boots, meeting Kon by chance in the subway, but later shifts into a red corset and a billowing skirt — the epitome of red-carpet glamour. Her high life, though, is found not with Kon but with the producer; red carpets and power, not warehouse squats.

Stella Baker’s performance dazzles particularly in these transitions — she is fragile and fierce, buoying every scene she occupies with urgency.

Her Nico embodies the Nina figure of Chekhov’s original, caught in a fraught love triangle reminiscent of The Seagull: Kon’s unrequited affection, Nico’s longing for a bigger life, and her eventual turn toward the powerful producer — a modern-day Trigorin — who represents both opportunity and compromise.

Andrey Burkovskiy reappears as that producer, in a sharp suit and red tie, shouting “fantastic!” at every suggestion, even lapsing into a Trumpian cadence. For all the enthusiasm, Kon is shunted to the margins — off-off-off Broadway, in a church basement. Burkovskiy also conjures grotesque political apparitions: at one point striding on as Putin in a feverish parody of the well-known 2009 photograph of the president bare-chested on horseback, at another presiding over a rave in the notorious “aquadisco”, the underground nightclub alleged to be part of Putin’s Black Sea palace. Each sequence veers from hilarious to chilling, then back again to something unsettlingly real.

Kon drifts through Nico’s commune and the off-Broadway basement, but also into protests where a balaclava-clad woman shouts “end white privilege!” The satire targets less the protestors themselves than the stark contrast — if Russia silences with threats and erasure — America responds with taboos and limits. Even in the Land of the Free, Kon encounters new silences — suicide is a sensitive subject, and identity politics dictate who is allowed to speak.

Amid the carnival of protests and lovemaking, the quiet notes cut through. Kon tells his mother — now chasing him across the Atlantic, still begging him to come home — that she is no longer an actress but “a Putin’s whore”. By the end Kon has lost almost everything: Nico slips away, Anton is dead, even his mother abandons her plea for him to return.

What remains is the unanswerable question — what is the point of being an artist when your name has been erased?

The design, by Alexander Shishkin with costumes by Kristina Kharlashkina and lighting from Brian H. Scott and Sam Saliba, makes these contradictions visible and grows increasingly surreal. Scarlet lampshades suggest Soviet drawing rooms, while a heavy velvet curtain recalls both Chekhovian stagecraft and Soviet pomp.

From there the imagery escalates: the simple glow of a dressing-room mirror gives way to a chair swinging on ropes to mimic Kon’s flight into exile; a bathtub is wheeled on, an inflatable mattress flung across the stage, plastic backdrops sprayed with graffiti. At one point shaving foam is used to trace a white outline that looks more like a dead body than a bird — only faintly suggestive of wings.

A dynamic trio of performers — Keshet Pratt, Ohad Mazor, and Myles McCabe III — return from the original New York run, bringing continuity and depth to the London production. Pratt delivers a sharp, modern edge as Pickle; Mazor infuses Dmitri with fluidity and physical dynamism; and McCabe commands a strong presence as Sasha. Together, they ground the production with energy and precision.

And where, you may ask, is the seagull in all this? Everywhere and nowhere. Each character dreams of flight in their own way: a mother who finally stops dragging her son back into a trap; a son who risks staging his own work without the vertical and horizontal safety nets of family and state; Anton, who writes poetry in prison until his voice is cut short; Nico, chasing her red-carpet fantasy and briefly catching it.

It is a messy, exhausting evening, but it earns its mess. Molochnikov may not resolve the contradictions of exile, but he refuses to smooth them over. The result is theatre that is alive to its moment — and alive in all its absurd, painful vitality.

Final verdict: ★★★★½ – At Marylebone Theatre, a chaotic Chekhov remix collides with censorship, displacement and a cliff-edge dive into ‘Western freedoms’.

Seagull: True Story runs at Marylebone Theatre from 5 September to 12 October 2025. Tickets are available via the Marylebone Theatre website, with prices starting at £22.75.