Summary
This play shows a concentration and ordering of detail in all departments of theatre only equal in Chekhov's playwriting to The Cherry Orchard. It was his strong alignment with a particular playhouse and company of actors which encouraged this development, and this was the first play he had written in its entirety with a fair confidence in how it was going to be handled in the theatre. Nemirovich-Danchenko commented, ‘Chekhov did something in his play that is usually censured by the shrewdest dramatic critics: he had written a play for definitely designated actors.’ But to satisfy so exact a skill as Chekhov was acquiring, we may rather praise than blame him for using the tools he knew.
The coming together of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to found the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 was an event of major importance for the modern theatre. The happy accident of a dedicated theatre's finding its own playwright when the time was ripe for the new realism meant that Chekhov could establish his style and experiment within it with effects of oblique humour and submerged feeling which only he could conceive. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, having eliminated much of the older tradition of ‘projected’ acting and self-exhibition in their direction of The Seagull, had turned a failure into a success by maintaining a quality of theatrical honesty and a loyalty to the intentions of the play as a whole. Never had a dramatist more needed this kind of sympathetic treatment.
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- Chekhov in Performance , pp. 145 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1971