The Seagull at the Barbican review: is Cate Blanchett’s performance the year’s best?

You keep thinking, as all the characters face their reckoning, that the carapace will crack, but it never does. Even as she begs her lover not to leave her for a 20-year-old girl, it’s still a performance. She strips to her waist, writhes on the floor, cries. ‘You think I’m acting?’ she weeps at Trigorin. Yes, is the answer. It’s an immensely skilled performance from Blanchett, to act acting like that, and to do it in so many different ways.