The seagull

The Seagull, a spectacular failure on its first appearance, was the play that, on its second, established Anton Chekhov as an important and revolutionary dramatist. Here, amid 'the weariness of life in the country', the famous actress Arkadina presides over a household riven with desperate love, with dreams of success and dread of failure. It is her son, Konstantin, who one day shoots a seagull; it is the novelist, Trigorin, who will one day write the story of the seagull so casually killed; but it is Nina, 'the seagull' herself, whose life to come will rewrite the story. Tom Stoppard has made this English version for the Peter Hall Company at the Old Vic (Spring 1997), and has added an introduction which indicates some of the problems translators have faced since the first English language Seagull in 1909.