Anton Chekhov

But the brilliant coup de theatre is to have the stage curtain taken up during the social ceremony; what might have been merely a naturalistic byblow becomes a symbolic revelation that Treplyov's effort is indeed spent, and the drama of Nina and Trigorin is about to begin. The pause that follows Shamrayev's story marks a first intermission, during which the liaison between the two is tacitly forged.

The two-year hiatus between the third and fourth acts stresses the recurrent theme of memory. The past is always idyllic: Arkadina's retrospection of life along the lakeshore, Polina's evocation of her past fling with the Doctor, Shamrayev's anecdotes of antediluvian actors, Sorin's rosy picture of an urban existence are the older generation's forecast of the clashing recollections of Trep­lyov and Nina. With wry irony, Chekhov divulges each of his characters' insensitivity or obliviousness. 'It's too late,' insists Dr. Dorn when Polina tries to rekindle their earlier affair. 'I don't remember,' shrugs Arkadina when her son recalls her charitable behaviour to an injured laundress. 'I don't remember,' says Trigorin when he is shown the gull he ordered stuffed and mounted in memory of his interview with Nina.

In the last act, the two-year hiatus also sets the charac­ters' development in sharper highlight. Arkadina, Trigorin and the older generation have remained the same; Sorin's stasis has even been intensified by his illness. The only characters to have undergone change are the four young people. Nina and Masha have both compromised their fantasies, Masha by hanging about Treplyov even though she knows her love is hopeless, and Nina by persevering, though aware that stardom is out of her reach. Med- vedenko has become more subdued, less anxious to correct his wife; his insistent material worries have modulated into low-keyed domestic fretting. Treplyov has forgotten why he wants to write, although he persists at it. If Nina and Masha are about to turn into pallid versions of Arkadina and Polina, Medvedenko and Treplyov do not have the stamina to become even Shamrayev and Trigorin. The repetition of the monologue from Treplyov's play makes clear the distance travelled between Acts One and Four.

Another new form that Chekhov practised in The Seagull was an emblematic progression of locales. The first act is set in 'a portion of the park on Sorin's estate,' where the path to the lake is blocked off by Treplyov's platform stage. This particular region is remote from the main house, and Treplyov has chosen it as his private turf: the characters who come to make up his audience must enter his world of shadows and damp (Polina fears the Doctor will catch cold), and they spend only a brief time there, before returning to safe norms evoked by the strains of the piano drifting into the clearing. Treplyov wants his work of art to be seen as co-existent with nature, with the 'spellbinding lake,' as Dorn calls it; ironically, his man-made stage prevents people from walking to the lake which his mother identifies with 'laughter, noise, shooting, and one romance after another,' ordinary diversions Treplyov disdains. The most casual response to the lake comes from Trigorin who sees it simply as a place to fish.

Act Two moves to Arkadina's territory, a house with a large veranda. The lake can be seen now in the bright light of the sun, not the pallid rays of the moon; but the surrounding verdure is a 'croquet lawn'. Such lawns must be well-kempt, not unlike Arkadina herself, who 'keeps myself in trim, as the saying goes, and I'm always dressed and have my hair done in the latest style'. Notably, Treplyov is the only member of the family circle who does not go into the house during the act. It stands for

Arkadina's hold on life, and from its depths comes the call that keeps Trigorin on the estate.

The dining-room of Act Three brings us into the house; but it is a neutral space, used for solitary meals, changing the dressing on wounds, saying farewells. The act is organized as a series of tete-a-tetes which are all the more intense for taking place in a locale no one can call his own. The last act is a drawing-room which Treplyov has turned into a workroom; as the act opens, preparations are being made to convert it to a sickroom. The huddling together of the dying Sorin and the creatively moribund Treplyov implies that they are both Thomme qui a voulu' but who never got what he wanted: a wife and a literary career. Once again, Treplyov has tried to establish a space of his own, only to find it overrun by a bustling form of life that ejects him totally by the end. To have a moment alone with Nina, he must close the door to the dining-room and bar it with a chair; when he removes the impediment, the intruders establish a gameroom, and his private act of suicide must happen somewhere else, prefaced by the pathetic fear that 'Mama might be distressed'.