Wessex Grove Plans New York Version Of Cate Blanchett’s ‘The Seagull’

EXCLUSIVE: Adorning the office wall of Benjamin Lowy and Emily Vaughan-Barratt’s Wessex Grove theatrical production company is a selection of esoteric images featuring Cate Blanchett, Emma Corrin, Kodi Smith McPhee, and Tom Burke in Chekhov’s The Seagull.

The Thomas Ostermeier-directed adaptation at the Barbican, London, was a sold-out critical sensation earlier this year, and Wessex Grove’s lead producers — who spent years developing it — hope to transfer the show to New York  “maybe” in Spring 2027, says Vaughan-Barratt, cautiously.

“It’s dealing with everybody’s diaries and schedules,” Vaughan-Barratt sighs. “It’s not straightforward,” she shrugs. “No, not when you have this level of actors,” adds Lowy.

They would want to “take everybody if we could,” says Vaughan-Barratt brightly. “But Cate, Emma, Kodi, Tom and everyone are busy all the time,” she laughs. “I don’t know how we managed to do this, to get them all at the same time in the first place.”

Blanchett has already spoken out publicly about wanting to take The Seagull to New York. “They all want to do it,” adds Vaughan-Barratt.

The task of aligning them all for New York is well underway.   

In another section of the suite of rooms Wessex Grove sublets from producer Jamie Wilson (Just for One Day, The Devil Wears Prada), is some of the artwork for their forthcoming revival of Arthur Miller’s 1947 Tony Award-winning play All My Sons, starring Bryan Cranston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Paapa Essiedu, Tom Glynn-Carney, and Hayley Squires. It is directed by Ivo van Hove. 

It begins performances at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre from November 14, running through March 7, 2026. Both U.S.-born Lowy and UK-born Vaughan-Barratt enjoy the creativity in developing a show from scratch and seeing it grow over time until whatever it is, blossoms.

“I’m really interested in how you get the alchemy, right,” says Vaughan-Barratt, who smiles when she explains “why one person will work for a certain director but not for another director.”

A lot of the directors they work with, Vaughan-Barratt continues, work in very specific ways “so there are lots of actors that would suit one but wouldn’t suit another because the European style, or the European influence creates a very different rehearsal room,” and “we work with Thomas [Ostermeier] and with Ivo [van Hove], both of them frequently,” she adds by way of explanation.

Vaughan-Barratt reckons Blanchett and Ostermeier are “a good fit” because both “love that exploratory, expansive amount of time,” to study a text. Whereas, she suggests that van Hove and Cranston like to crack on with it. “Ivo likes to create this pressure cooker where you just plow through and Brian loves that .”

These plays — The Seagull and All My Sons — are but two examples of the kind of theatrical plate-spinning that the partners revel in.

They both knew of each other, but were properly introduced by Mel Kenyon, head of theater at Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, when Vaughan-Barratt, then with the Ambassador Theatre Group, was looking for someone to partner with on director and producer, Jamie Lloyd’s mammoth Pinter at the Pinter series of seven of Harold Pinter’s plays.

Their professional relationship developed into friendship when both were involved in the transfer to the Bernard B. Jacob’s Theatre on Broadway of Lloyd’s acclaimed revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal starring Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton, and Charlie Cox in 2019, which had been part of the Pinter at the Pinter season.

The name Wessex Grove is a witty wink to Betrayal, it being the address where Emma and Jerry, the characters from Betrayal, embark on their tryst.

The pandemic upended Wessex Grove’s launch,but it allowed them valuable time to meet over Zoom with writers, directors, actors, and theater owners, to develop an array of shows. Over the past five years, they have become a force in the West End and I admire them for not making easy choices.

Nick Payne’s Constellations, directed by Michael Longhurst, in collaboration, with the Donmar Warehouse, was first. Audiences, hungry for live theater following the pandemic, lapped up the four different casts –  Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah, Peter Capaldi and Zoë Wanamaker, Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey, and Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd – who’d been assembled to take turns performing the play’s characters, a quantum physicist and a beekeeper.

The show was later streamed online by the marvel that is NT Live.

The stakes seemed somewhat higher when it came to van Hove’s epic stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s often harrowing 700-page best-selling novel, A Little Life. 

For starters, Lowy and Vaughan-Barratt had a tough time convincing theater owners to trust that A Little Life, with its trauma-filled story, played out for 3 hours and 40 minutes, was a punt worth taking. 

“It was nearly four hours, the subject matter, and who would want to see this live?” were among the questions they were being asked, says Lowy. “We were so nervous and it was so hard to convince other people to see what we saw.” 

Their answer came within an hour of tickets going on sale, when they received an email showing there had been record-breaking sales for its run at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It surely helped that the show’s ensemble was led by James Norton (House of Guinness, Happy Valley), Luke Thompson (Bridgerton), Omari Douglas (Black Doves, It’s A Sin), Zach Wyatt (The Witcher: Blood Origin), Elliott Cowan (Foundation), Zubin Varla (Andor), Nathalie Armin (Showgirl) and Emilio Doorgasingh (Game of Thrones). 

“It was very gratifying to have worked so hard on something to go: ‘Look! People want to see this!’” cries Vaughan-Barratt.

However, there was a low point, says Lowy, when a snapper took “naked pictures of James Norton” during the tryout at Richmond Theatre. It was the first preview, and with lightning speed, the photos of Norton in all his glory were online. 

Security was stepped up when it moved into the Harold Pinter, and if people wanted to see Norton’s- and Thompson’s- bits that desperately, they’d have to buy a ticket — and keep their cameras tucked out of the way. Frankly, it was the play that I found riveting — and harrowing — although I know of others who got their jollies in other ways!

The play took off, and later moved to the Savoy Theatre for an extended run.

Taking Simon Stephens’ play, Vanya [based on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya], starring Andrew Scott, zipping through multiple roles, from the West End to Broadway, was both an artistic and a commercial success, with Scott winning possibly every award going in London and New York. “I just think it’s impossible not to see him in that and not realise that he’s the best actor of his generation,” argues Vaughan-Barratt.

“Also, when we were in New York, particularly, you get a list every morning of the notables that are coming that night, and every day we’d look at that list of big name directors and actors, and wonder how we’re going to fit them into that space,” she exclaims.

Both Lowy and Vaughan-Barratt note that Scott, Stephens, and director Sam Yates, spent two years developing Vanya.

“It’s so fun, there’s nothing better than being a hit in New York,” says Lowy, with gleeful zest.

“You’re the talk of the town, right?” he adds after I tell him that when I interviewed Michael Crawford the morning following his triumph in Phantom of the Opera at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre in 1988. The actor boasted to me “that you don’t know what a hit is until you’re a hit on Broadway.” Frank Rich, and everyone else loved him, so he was a very happy man that day.

“I think you feel it there more than you feel it here and I think that’s why it’s so tantalizing,” says Vaughan-Barratt while observing that’s why the people like Jodie Comer (Prima Facie), Sarah Snook (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and Scott want to perform in New York City.

It seems the right time to bring back Miller’s All My Sons, a 1947 play, as Lowy puts it, “about culpability.”

Vaughan-Barratt says that Cranston, who won a Best Actor Tony Award for when he starred in van Hove’s version of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, which originated at the National Theatre in 2018, has been attached for 18 months and that the actor and van Hove have had “many conversations” about the production. “I think it’s very settled in Ivo’s brain about what he wants to do,” says Vaughan-Barrett.

Along with working with Ostermeier on the Broadway transfer of The Seagull, Vaughan-Barratt allows that she and Lowy are in constant discussion with Berlin-based Ostermeier about “three or four things that we’re trying to do,” says Vaughan-Barratt, who also reveals that Ostermeier “is really interested in making shows” for the people who were in his production of his version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. It starred Matt Smith (Doctor Who, The Crown), Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey, Playing Nice), and Priyanga Burford (Industry, No Time to Die) and The Seagull ensemble.

“Thomas loved Cate Blanchett, Tom Burk,e and Emma Corrin, he loved all of them,” says Vaughan-Barratt. “It’s like his own little troupe,” and he wants to continue creating shows with them, says Lowy. And there could be something as soon as fall 2026 “with one of them,” adds Vaughan-Barratt.

The two producers have also formed a close bond with BAFTA and Olivier Award-winner Sheridan Smith.

 “I’d love to keep working with Sheridan. She was at her absolute best in Opening Night,” says Vaughan-Barratt. 

In one preview, van Hove changed the first 20 minutes with a whole new monologue for Smith and “she looked at it the paper once, and was like, ‘I got it.’ She put the paper down and just got it. She’s such a theater animal,” says Lowy, snapping his fingers. 

Opening Night is a musical with a book by van Hove and music and lyrics by Rufus Wainwright, based on the John Cassavetes 1977 movie Opening Night, featuring Gena Rowlands as a Broadway star, on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she prepares to open in a new play.

It was slammed by many reviewers, who failed to understand, I feel, that the audience was meant to experience the breakdown along with Smith’s character. Okay, maybe too much to ask. For me, however bonkers, Smith’s electrifying performance has stayed with me.

Wessex Grove has already announced that Smith will return to the West End in Alan Ayckbourn’s masterpiece, Woman in Mind, which Michael Longhurst will direct at the Duke of York’s Theatre with performances beginning on December 9. At that very same address two years ago, Smith excelled as Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine for director Matthew Dunster and producer David Pugh.

There are also plans, they say, for James Norton to return to the West End in a show that’s in early stages of development.

“Keeping people in the fold, and saying to Sheridan, and saying to James and saying to Andrew [Scott]: ‘What do you want to do next, and how can we build it around you, how can we make it work?’ We want to work with new people too, but we also want to continue friendships,” Vaughan-Barratt tells us.

“It’s nice having a little bit of a family,” adds Lowy.

Eventually, Vaughan-Barratt admits, “we’re looking at whether or not we can do some new musicals or whether or not we can do some bits of, I don’t mean  IP in a derogatory way, but things that have longer life,” while also remembering some words of wisdom passed down from Fiery Angel Production’s Marilyn Eardley, who advised them not to rely on doing just short-run plays.

”And here we’ve ended up just doing short-run plays, so it is on our minds to think about how we expand,” to develop a show that can, hopefully, become a long runner, maintains Vaughan-Barratt.

They are well aware of the risks and the work involved – and the possibility of misfires, which is why they’re treading carefully in their development of a hoped-for long-runner.

 And they know full well that Cameron Mackintosh didn’t achieve success with Les Misérables overnight. I covered it. I saw how it was put together. Legendary agent, the late Patricia Macnaughton, would tell me of the countless trips she made to Paris to negotiate with Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil – and how her client John Napier created the landmark sets. I used to sit opposite the great lyricist Herbert Kretzmer. 

And I watched how Judy Craymer spent years developing what became Mamma Mia! 

After the first preview, grey men in grey suits claimed it wouldn’t last until the end of the month. Craymer’s just been out in NYC for Mamma Mia!’s return to Broadway, where it’s one of the top-grossing shows. And it’s still on in London after 26 years.

Wessex Grove is up for risk taking, just as all producers are. But, I sense that they understand the stakes better than some. As Lowy remarks, a long-runner doesn’t need to be a mega-musical. The musical Six is mentioned. “If I produced Six, I’d be happy everyday,” Vaughan-Barratt trills.

We discuss Agatha Christie’s Witness For the Prosecution, which the producer Eleanor Lloyd has had running in a courtroom setting at County Hall, the one-time home of the former Greater London Council, for eight years. 

“It doesn’t have to be a big jazzy something, that’s not really who we are,” Lowy insists.

Their office building near Leicester Square is on a corner of Charing Cross Road close to where Louis Benjamin once controlled the old Stoll Moss theater empire before it was sold off to the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Nica Burns, and Cameron Mackintosh.

The room adjacent to Benjamin’s office would be full of producers, coming and going, trying to cajole the ever-so-savvy Benjamin into letting them book one of his West End palaces. When I think about it now, in the 15 or so years, that I would go and visit him, I never saw a female producer with him in his office.

Times have changed, for the good. Lowy and Vaughan-Barratt describe their building as a “theater hub,” because of the many other production houses also based there – Eleanor Lloyd Productions, Francesca Moody Productions, Playful Productions, all three have women in managing positions.

Wessex Grove is a cool address to have in the heart of the West End. And they make a lovely cuppa tea.