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Dan Rebellato’s 2010 play, Chekhov in Hell, opens with a quotation from Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright and author who died in 1904. He says ‘you ask me what life is. That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know’.
The Moscow Art Theatre at the end of 19th century.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko set about to reform Russian theatre. Their aim was to create a home for naturalism, in order to challenge melodrama’s dominance of theatre in Russia.
The Company of The Seagull. Photo: Tristram Kenton.
Discover more about the lives of the characters in Chekhov's The Seagull, as imagined by the company who play them.
Find out more about the times in which Chekhov lived and worked.
When Anton Chekhov’s classic The Seagull premiered on 17 October 1896 in St. Petersburg at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, it was a complete failure both in the audience’s, the critics’ and Chekhov’s own opinion. How then did a play initially booed by its audience become, as Konstantin Rudnitsky argues, ‘one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama’?
Blanche McIntyre gives Judi Herman a director's-eye-view of The Seagull.
She discusses her collaboration wtih designer Laura Hopkins and her extraordinary staging of Chekhov's great exploration of artistic creativity, unrequited love and the clashes between the generations.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia in 1860.He was the third child of six to Pavel Egorovich Chekhov, a grocer. His grandfather had been a serf, who had managed to buy his family’s freedom in 1841. During his childhood, the young Chekhov and his siblings worked in the family store and studied at their local school.
So we’re into week 5 and we’re all settling into the comfortable surroundings of the Nuffield Theatre Southampton. The set has been built and installed on stage so it’s time for tech rehearsals. This is when the actors get onto the set for the first time and the technical crew get a chance to rehearse the lighting and sound. The lighting and sound desks are out in the auditorium rather than hidden away in the lighting box. There are wires everywhere and there are countless calls from the various technical people that seem to be in a different language, which sounds like English, but it seems to be in a strange code. Phrases like "Put the SL Boom Base DS of the leg. Don't think we'll need an Iris, but you never know" might sound mystifying to the casual listener but they are clear as day to the technical crew.
The rehearsed reading gives the clearest sense yet of bodies on a stage – people – trying to do things to and get things from one another, rather than a series of talking heads showing off verbally. I do the voices a lot when I'm writing which gets you so far but hearing good actors, really good actors – as we had for the rehearsed reading of The Seagull – allows the play to emerge much more clearly. And this is terrifically exciting.
I have been thinking about water surfaces, and this reminded me of the boat sequence in Night of the Hunter; it's completely wrong, but something about it snagged me...
So what happens when the fragmented sections of rehearsals are pieced together for the first run through? Well. A collective gulp and then off we go…
I'm raising something mad here. Is that even possible, let alone effective?!
‘NINA This isn’t real. It’s a dream’
The artist David Johnson on the relationship between imagination and reality.
‘Reality is something we experience in the gut rather than the intellect, though what exactly we experience will slowly be modified by what we believe.’
There are so many things happening in the rehearsal room, it’s sometimes difficult to know what might be interesting for you folks to see. So to give you an overarching feel for week two, I’ll start with how I’m trying to use day-to-day observations to visualise the process.
One of the most fascinating moments in the rehearsal room is seeing what the director chooses to do first.
Photo: Jörg Hempel.
A good thing it is for a man who, on such nights, sits under his own roof, in a warm corner like a seagull.
Idea for a story. A beautiful young girl lives by a lake all her life. She loves this lake. She's happy and free, like that bird was once. Then a man comes along and for no reason at all – what do you think he does?
The Theatre is DEAD. There must be a new theatre.
‘The lake. Such majesty in nature. Eight thirty one the moon’ll rise over the woods and who needs scenery?’
Explore some of the images that inspired Laura Hopkin’s design for The Seagull.