Production Archive

The Seagull (1896) is the earliest and perhaps the most fragile of Chekhov's four masterpieces. The major themes of love and art are explored in the relationships between characters and the frustrations and failures they experience. Chekhov sought to show life as it is, devoid of the convenient moral judgements, patterns and the order that art traditionally imposes on human experience. Chekhov called The Seagull a comedy but its comic nature is grounded in irony, and a sense of the absurdity and meaningless of human endeavour.