The Seagull

Written in 1895, The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of legendary playwright Anton Chekhov's four major plays. The opening night of the first production in 1896 was a famous failure, punctuated by his lead actress losing her voice due to her intimidation of the hostile crowd. Chekhov left the audience and spent the last two acts behind the scenes, and after the performance he was convinced that his dream of being a writer was over. Friends and supporters later tried to assure him of the play's merits once the original production later became a success, but he assumed that were simply trying to be kind. When Konstantin Stanislavski (as in the Stanislavski - the seminal Russian theatre practitioner) directed it in 1898 for his Moscow Art Theatre, the play was a triumph. His production became one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama, and it firmly established Chekhov as a tremendous force in worth theatre. In more than a century since its creation, The Seagull continues to be recognized as one of the all-time great plays ever written.