The Seagull

By the lake on the country estate of the aged and ill Sorin and his sister, the famous actress Arkadina, Arkadina’s son Konstantin Treplyov wants to present his vision of a new theatre through a staging of his play. A failed artistic event begins to uncover different longings and to draw numerous love triangles inside the selected company. Treplyov, who wants to succeed as a playwright, is in love with Nina, a young girl who silently wishes to become an actress, but she is charmed by Trigorin, a successful writer and lover of the egocentric Irina. Masha, the daughter of Polina, who is unhappily married to the pragmatic Shamrayev, the manager of Sorin’s estate, and yearns for the attention of the physician Dorn, is unrequitedly in love with Treplyov, while teacher Medvedenko is struggling to get her attention. The situation promises a comedy. And Chekhov began writing it as such: “I’m writing something strange (...) I’m offending terribly against the conventions of the stage. It’s a comedy, with three female roles, six male, four acts, a landscape (a lake view), much talk about literature, little action, and five tons of love ...” But two years pass between the third and fourth act, a time in which many people go through terrible disappointments, and so, in the closing atmosphere, tragic tones hush the comedy.

The Seagull, one of the most frequently performed texts by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, failed so badly at its baptismal performance in 1896 that Chekhov would have certainly stopped writing for stage, had the play then not been read by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the great reformers of the Russian theatre, who triggered, with their staging of The Seagull at the MHAT, an understanding of the dramatist’s writing that was very different from the then-prevailing convention, and their successful staging encouraged his continuing playwriting work. The play, with its subtly expressed experiences of love and jealousy, illumination of the banality of the famous and the melancholy of the unsuccessful, presenting the generational conflicts and the feeling of no perspective is challenging and forever topical; and last not least, inspiring with its core question about the point of art. This question particularly excites us considering today’s state of the world, of art in general, and of theatre in particular. In a new translation by Borut Kraševec, the performance was directed by Paolo Magelli, an internationally renowned director who in Nova Gorica has so far directed  Gogol’s Marriage (2001) and Gorky’s Summerfolk (2008).