The Seagull

The Seagull: Black Coffee Theatre

The Bright Young Things of the roaring '20s have changed the mood in a town fuelled by the boom of jazz, fashion and the arts, but on an estate in the country there is only a lake, and the people around it burn for something more...

Anyone who knows Chekhov - whether actor, writer or scholar - has an opinion on how the play should be interpreted and performed.

In this version, Black Coffee Theatre suggests how Chekhov could be performed. Leave your preconceptions at the door and immerse yourself in the world created in an attempt to excavate and define the work of a master of Russian theatre.

The Seagull, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896, is the first of what are generally considered to be the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the ingénue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Tréplev, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin.

As with the rest of Chekhov's full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In contrast to the melodrama of the mainstream theatre of the 19th Century, lurid actions are not shown onstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly; they are full of subtext.