Giving Greystones The Classic Bird

Katie Lacey-Curtis at The Whale SUN23NOV25

t was back in February 2019 that the teenage Katie Lacey-Curtis made her stage debut, as part of Making Waves Youth Theatre’s twist of a Shakespeare classic, entitled Juliet Of Verona.

Having naturally made the move to Making Waves’ big sister, The Greystones Players, at just 23 years of age, Katie is about to direct the 1896 Anton Chekov classic The Seagull.

So, no pressure.

“It doesn’t feel like pressure,” says Katie when we catch up at The Whale this sunny Sunday afternoon. “It just feels like a challenge, and that’s what you always want when it comes to the theatre, to art in general. If it doesn’t challenge, doesn’t push you to learn something new, what’s the point…?”

When it comes to tough challenges on the stage, Chekov is one of the world’s most loved, and feared. And the fact that The Seagull had a baptism of fire before finding its audience proved it was a challenge almost beyond its author too. Its opening night back on October 17th 1896 in St Petersburg was a disaster, the hostile reaction driving leading lady Vera Komissarzhevskaya to lose her voice, with Chekov himself leaving the audience to spend the last two acts behind the scenes. It was only when theatre wiz Konstantin Stanislavski directed The Seagull in 1898 for his Moscow Art Theatre that the play became a huge success. This later production was hailed as “one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama“.

The Greystones Players cast

So, no pressure.

“That just shows how complex The Seagull is,” laughs Katie. “Stanislavski saw the play as a tragedy; Chekov saw it as a comedy. Two sides of the same coin, of course, but it means that the play can be read in so many different ways. That’s exciting for an actor, and for a director.”

You can catch The Greystones Players’ production of The Seagull at The Whale from Friday, December 5th to Sunday 7th here.

In the meantime, we talked to Katie Lacey-Curtis about the actor’s life, the power and the glory of directing, and keeping theatre alive in Greystones…

Once again, you can grab your tickets for Chekov’s The Seagull here, and find out more about Greystones Players here and Making Waves Youth Theatre here.