The Sea-Gull

The Sea-Gull is a play in four acts by Anton Chekhov, first performed in St Petersburg in 1896 and famous for its disastrous premiere, which Chekhov attended and which left him so discouraged that he briefly swore off writing for the theater. The play was revived two years later by Konstantin Stanislavski at the new Moscow Art Theatre, where it was a major success and where it established the working relationship between Chekhov and the company that would produce all his major later plays.

The action of the play takes place on and near a country estate belonging to Sorin, an aging retired civil servant. His sister, the celebrated actress Irina Arkadina, is visiting with her lover, the successful but conventional novelist Trigorin. Arkadina’s son Treplev is also at the estate. He is a young aspiring playwright with ambitions to create a new kind of theater, very different from the popular work his mother has built her career on. Nina, a young woman from a neighbouring estate, is in love with Treplev and dreams of becoming an actress. Treplev produces a strange experimental play on a lakeside stage, which fails. Nina then meets Trigorin and falls in love with him. The next three acts work out the consequences of that meeting across two years, with Nina ruined and Treplev driven toward the end the play arrives at.

The symbol of the dead sea gull, which Treplev shoots and presents to Nina in the second act and which Trigorin then uses as the seed of a short story idea, runs through the play as the central image. Chekhov was experimenting with a kind of dramatic writing in which nothing important happens on the surface and where the real action is in the small misalignments between what characters say and what they actually feel. The Sea Gull was the play in which the method first fully worked, and it set the pattern for Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard that followed.

The play runs about a hundred pages in the standard published form. It is best read in one sitting and ideally seen in a good production. For readers new to Chekhov’s plays, The Sea Gull is the place to start. It pairs naturally with Uncle Vanya, the next of the major plays, which Chekhov developed partly from earlier material around the same time.