The Seagull (Oberon Modern Plays)
May not contain Access Codes or Supplements. Buy with confidence, excellent customer service!
SearchWorks Catalog
The Sea Gull Anton Chekhov A - Z Books Published: The Seagull Anton Chekhov The Sea-Gull Anton Chekhov Charles Scribner's Sons, Translated by Stark Young. Scribner's "A" on copyright page. Act II takes place in the afternoon outside of the estate, a few days later. After reminiscing about happier times, Arkadina becomes engaged in a heated argument with the house steward Shamrayev and decides to leave immediately. Nina lingers behind after the group leaves, and Konstantin shows up to give her a seagull that he has shot.
Nina is confused and horrified at the gift. Konstantin sees Trigorin approaching, and leaves in a jealous fit.
- Seals of Creation Book 1 Awakening.
- The Beginner’s Guide to Ghosts and Haunting.
- The Seagull by Oberon Books Ltd (Paperback, ) | eBay?
- DNA Topoisomerases and Cancer (Cancer Drug Discovery and Development)!
- Follow the Author.
- Brain Strain: A Mental Muscle Workout Thats Fun! 73 Puzzles from Odyssey!
- Matthew Pooles Commentary on the Holy Bible - Book of Nehemiah (Annotated)!
Nina asks Trigorin to tell her about the writer's life; he replies that it is not an easy one. Nina says that she knows the life of an actress is not easy either, but she wants more than anything to be one. Trigorin sees the seagull that Konstantin has shot and muses on how he could use it as a subject for a short story: She loves the lake, like a seagull, and she's happy and free, like a seagull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom.
Nina lingers behind, enthralled with Trigorin's celebrity and modesty, and gushes, "My dream! Between acts Konstantin attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head, but the bullet only grazed his skull. He spends the majority of Act III with his scalp heavily bandaged.
Special offers and product promotions
Nina finds Trigorin eating breakfast and presents him with a medallion that proclaims her devotion to him using a line from one of Trigorin's own books: Arkadina appears, followed by Sorin, whose health has continued to deteriorate. Trigorin leaves to continue packing. There is a brief argument between Arkadina and Sorin, after which Sorin collapses in grief. He is helped off by Medvedenko.
Konstantin enters and asks his mother to change his bandage. As she is doing this, Konstantin disparages Trigorin and there is another argument. When Trigorin reenters, Konstantin leaves in tears.
Translating The Seagull: how far can you push Chekhov?
Trigorin asks Arkadina if they can stay at the estate. She flatters and cajoles him until he agrees to return with her to Moscow. After she has left the room, Nina comes to say her final goodbye to Trigorin and to inform him that she is running away to become an actress, against her parents' wishes. They kiss passionately and make plans to meet again in Moscow. Act IV takes place during the winter two years later, in the drawing room that has been converted to Konstantin's study.
Masha has finally accepted Medvedenko's marriage proposal, and they have a child together, though Masha still nurses an unrequited love for Konstantin. Various characters discuss what has happened in the two years that have passed: Nina and Trigorin lived together in Moscow for a time until he abandoned her and went back to Arkadina. Nina never achieved any real success as an actress, and is currently on a tour of the provinces with a small theatre group.
Konstantin has had some short stories published, but is increasingly depressed. Sorin's health is still failing, and the people at the estate have telegraphed for Arkadina to come for his final days. Most of the play's characters go to the drawing room to play a game of bingo.
Konstantin does not join them, and spends this time working on a manuscript at his desk. After the group leaves to eat dinner, Konstantin hears someone at the back door. He is surprised to find Nina, whom he invites inside. Nina tells Konstantin about her life over the last two years.
She starts to compare herself to the seagull that Konstantin killed in Act II, then rejects that and says "I am an actress. Konstantin pleads with her to stay, but she is in such disarray that his pleading means nothing. She embraces Konstantin, and leaves. Despondent, Konstantin spends two minutes silently tearing up his manuscripts before leaving the study.
The group reenters and returns to the bingo game. There is a sudden gunshot from off-stage, and Dorn goes to investigate. He returns and takes Trigorin aside. Dorn tells Trigorin to somehow get Arkadina away, for Konstantin has just shot himself. The first night of The Seagull on 17 October at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg was a disaster, booed by the audience.
The Seagull - Wikipedia
The hostile audience intimidated Vera Komissarzhevskaya so severely that she lost her voice. Some considered her the best actor in Russia and who, according to Chekhov, had moved people to tears as Nina in rehearsal. The Seagull impressed the playwright and friend of Chekhov Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko , however, who said Chekhov should have won the Griboyedov prize that year for The Seagull instead of himself. Nemirovich overcame Chekhov's refusal to allow the play to appear in Moscow and convinced Stanislavski to direct the play for their innovative and newly founded Moscow Art Theatre in Stanislavski played Trigorin, while Vsevolod Meyerhold , the future director and practitioner whom Stanislavski on his death-bed declared to be "my sole heir in the theatre" , played Konstantin, and Olga Knipper Chekhov's future wife played Arkadina.
In the first act something special started, if you can so describe a mood of excitement in the audience that seemed to grow and grow. Most people walked through the auditorium and corridors with strange faces, looking as if it were their birthday and, indeed, dear God I'm not joking it was perfectly possible to go up to some completely strange woman and say: Nemirovich described the applause, which came after a prolonged silence, as bursting from the audience like a dam breaking.
It was not until 1 May that Chekhov saw the production, in a performance without sets but in make-up and costumes at the Paradiz Theatre.
Bestselling Series
Stanislavski's attention to psychological realism and ensemble playing coaxed the buried subtleties from the play and revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage. Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the script forced Stanislavski to dig beneath the surface of the text in ways that were new in theatre. In November , a Broadway staging directed by Marshall W. Mason opened at Lyceum Theatre, New York. Reiss, though, has sensibly judged that such formal, portentous language would be improbable coming from a young student, as Masha has become in the new production.
And so her version chops up the conversation, reflecting the verbal style of a young woman who texts and probably also tweets, and would show far less reflex social courtesy to interrogation by a dull schoolteacher than her Russian predecessor felt obliged to.
In Reiss's adaptation, Medvedenko starts the play by challenging, "Again? A single line of dialogue in the traditional adaptations has become three questions, and a statement and the second sentence now divides into five:. Reiss, whose own plays show an almost digital clarity in recording the tics of contemporary speech, has not only stripped the speeches of their facile delivery of back-story but also caught the cagey, resentful, fragmentary nature of much modern inter-generational conversation, through the way in which Masha instinctively treats her senior as a sort of policeman.
Later, the writer disrupts the expected rhythms of the play's curtain lines with equal success. Any reader who has not yet seen a production of The Seagull, and plans to, should perhaps be warned that the next paragraphs cannot avoid a Chekhovian plot-spoiler. The play ends with Konstantin Treplyov, an aspiring playwright, killing himself off-stage. Dorn, the doctor, goes to investigate the noise of a shot, discovers the body and returns to murmur the news to Trigorin, a famous novelist who is a house guest.
The radicalism of the scene is that the physician chooses not to interrupt a game of cards involving the dead man's mother, but to confide the information in an undertone to a single other character. Russian speakers have told me that it is almost impossible to capture in English the astonishing off-handedness of Dr Dorn's delivery.
Frayn fluent in Russian gives the line as: