Anton Chekhov

Treplyov's entrance with the dead gull to the actors' ad-libs when they went up in their lines. Chekhov fled the theatre, vowing never again to write for the stage. Nevertheless, the ensuing performances, with the actors more secure, played to respectful houses. Before The Seagull closed in early November, it had become a succes d'estime, with Kommis- sarzhevskaya proclaimed as luminous. It was successfully revived in Kiev, Taganrog and other provincial centres, providing Chekhov with handsome royalties.

Nemirovich-Danchenko, an admirer of the play, thought The Seagull just the thing to rescue the flagging fortunes of his newly founded Moscow Art Theatre, whose first season was in danger of bankruptcy. He pressed it upon his reluctant colleague Stanislavsky, who at first found the play incomprehensible and unsympathetic. He retired to his country estate to compose a directorial score which he sent piecemeal to Moscow where Nemirovich rehearsed the actors, including the future director Vsevolod Meyerhold as Treplyov, Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife-to-be, as Arkadina, and Aleksandr Vishnevsky, the author's boy­hood friend, as Dorn. Stanislavsky assumed the role of Trigorin.

Stanislavsky's fundamental approach to staging The Seagull differed little from his direction of historical drama. He sought in contemporary Russian life the same pictures­que groupings, the same telling mannerisms, the same pregnant pauses that had enthralled audiences when he reconstructed seventeenth-century Muscovy or Renais­sance Venice. Rather than inquiring into Chekhov's mean­ing, Stanislavsky took the play as a romantic melodrama: Nina was an innocent ruined by that 'scoundrelly Lovelace'¹ Trigorin, and Treplyov was a misunderstood Byronic genius, the hero of the piece. Nor, at this stage of his development, did Stanislavsky try organically to elicit performances from the actors. Their every action, reaction and intonation were prescribed by his score and learned by rote.

The opening night, 17th December 1898, despite off­stage jitters was a palpable hit, insuring the theatre's success, and the seagull became the Moscow Art Theatre's trademark. Chekhov was less than ecstatic. He thought that Stanislavsky misinterpreted Trigorin by making him too elegant and formal; he detested Roksanova's Nina. What­ever his misgivings, the middle-class professional audiences took to it precisely because, for the first time, 'the way we live now' was subjected to the same careful counterfeit presentment that had hitherto been applied only to the picturesque past. The spectators beheld their own tics and heard their own speech patterns meticulously copied.

Taking advantage of the outdoor settings of the early acts and the dimly lit interior at the end, Stanislavsky laid on climatic and atmospheric effects to create an overpowering nastroenie or mood. The method, relying on sound efects, diffused lighting and a snail's pace, worked so well for The Seagull that it became standard operating procedure at the Moscow Art Theatre for Chekhov's later plays and, indeed, those of almost any author. But already astute observers were noting these as obtrusive mannerisms. Prince Urusov, a fan of the Moscow Art Theatre production, called the red lighting at the beginning of Acts One and Four 'completely phoney' and 'unnatural'; 'such lighting, dim and sinister, keeps one from seeing and hearing'. The clever directorial trick of arranging the characters in a row with their backs to the audience 'may be innovative and daring, but . . . the actors hunch together embarrassed, compelled to speak to one side, twisting themselves into profiles, - otherwise they can't be heard'.²

In the last analysis, it was the mood that permeated that made The Seagull a hit. Meyerhold, in later years, credited Stanislavsky with being the first to link the sound of rain on the window and morning light peeping through the shutters with the characters' behaviour. 'At the time this was a discovery.'³ The dramatist Leonid Andreyev was to call it 'panpsychology,'⁴ the animation of everything in a Chekhov play from distant music to the chirp of a cricket to munching an apple, each sharing an equivalent relation to the play's total effect.