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The Seagull
Stoppard’s masterful adaptation of Chekhov’s best-loved play has been lauded by critics for its shining prose as well as its faithfulness. The play opens at a country estate, where a group of friends and relations have gathered to see the first performance of an experimental play, written and staged by the young man of the house, Konstantin. Among the audience are Konstantin’s mother, the actress Arkadina, and her lover, the famous novelist Trigorin. Their glamorous presence not only disrupts the performance, but soon takes on a more profound significance in the lives of all those present. This edition of The Seagull includes an introduction by Stoppard which addresses the issues faced by translators since its first appearance in English in 1909.
- GenresPlays
112 pages, Paperback
Published March 20, 2018
About the author
Tom Stoppard
157 books1,023 followersSir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 11, 2019
I feel like an idiot giving this a review. It's sort of like looking at the Grand Canyon. What is a beholder to say? "Quite a slice you got there?"
A sterling translation of a great play. The last scene between Nina and Konstantin broke my heart. If you do read this translation, take the time to read Stoppard's introduction, which details how he approached the task. Highly technical and completely enthralling. It will send me into the stacks of my college's library to hunt up other translations for comparison.
Highly recommend.
A sterling translation of a great play. The last scene between Nina and Konstantin broke my heart. If you do read this translation, take the time to read Stoppard's introduction, which details how he approached the task. Highly technical and completely enthralling. It will send me into the stacks of my college's library to hunt up other translations for comparison.
Highly recommend.
May 21, 2023
Chekhov called this play “A Comedy”, and it does start out like one with almost every character in love with someone else — the schoolteacher in love with Masha, who is in love with Treplov, who is in love with Nina, who is in love with Treplov, acting, and life. But the play goes darker as the unhappy mother-son relationship between actress Arkadina and would-be-writer Treplov takes center stage, and Nina’s desire to become an actress leads her in a new direction. Even the minor characters are vividly portrayed through dialog and interaction with other characters, and the characters have interesting perspectives on writing, acting, and fame. But a comedy? I don’t know who would be laughing when the curtain falls.
Read for Modern Drama class. Also listened to excellent audiobook production from Audible’s The Chekhov Collection.
Read for Modern Drama class. Also listened to excellent audiobook production from Audible’s The Chekhov Collection.
August 18, 2018
Tom Stoppard's version of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull is meant as a working edition for actors.
Well, how about the audience? This edition was for Peter Hall's company and also was featured at the Delacourte Theater in NYC by the Public Theater in 2001. I wish I had the opportunity to see the play performed in this edition, because it retains the intimacy of Chekhov's play - Stoppard (to his credit) does a great job in making the play quite enjoyable in its chattiness and an emphasis on the theatrical side of the story. SPOILER ALERT!: There is the general feeling of ennui and weltschmerz embodied in the play's famous opening lines of Masha being questioned on always wearing black and proceeds from there to Konstantin's rather awful Symbolist play being aborted in performance by the actress Arkadina's (Konstantin’s mother's) bored comments. In Chekhov, no one is really happy, but will willingly, somewhat stoically settle on what life will offer. Arkadina is as much a bad actress as her son is a mediocre playwright. Trigorin, Arkadina's lover is famous for his writing but is a cypher otherwise in the real world. Masha never gets to divulge her love for Konstantin and Konstantin, for his part is frustrated in his love for Nina, the aspiring actress in his play. At the end of the play, Nina is a provincial actress, and the situation among all the characters remains the same. The secondary characters express equal amounts of dissatisfaction with their given worlds: the elderly Sorin (Arkadina’s brother) expressing his wish that he hadn’t wasted his life with regrets for his lost youth; Polina (Masha’s mother) confessing to Dorn (the family friend and doctor) to live out their lives together, and Medvedenko complaining about his finances. Chekhov’s Seagull is a template for his later plays – culminating in his last two plays: Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. The world embodied in The Seagull sounds depressing but is quite intriguing if performed well with an ensemble: as with Chekhov, you get brief moments in these people’s lives for better or worse. Stoppard’s version of this great play is quite accessible and wonderful to read.
Well, how about the audience? This edition was for Peter Hall's company and also was featured at the Delacourte Theater in NYC by the Public Theater in 2001. I wish I had the opportunity to see the play performed in this edition, because it retains the intimacy of Chekhov's play - Stoppard (to his credit) does a great job in making the play quite enjoyable in its chattiness and an emphasis on the theatrical side of the story. SPOILER ALERT!: There is the general feeling of ennui and weltschmerz embodied in the play's famous opening lines of Masha being questioned on always wearing black and proceeds from there to Konstantin's rather awful Symbolist play being aborted in performance by the actress Arkadina's (Konstantin’s mother's) bored comments. In Chekhov, no one is really happy, but will willingly, somewhat stoically settle on what life will offer. Arkadina is as much a bad actress as her son is a mediocre playwright. Trigorin, Arkadina's lover is famous for his writing but is a cypher otherwise in the real world. Masha never gets to divulge her love for Konstantin and Konstantin, for his part is frustrated in his love for Nina, the aspiring actress in his play. At the end of the play, Nina is a provincial actress, and the situation among all the characters remains the same. The secondary characters express equal amounts of dissatisfaction with their given worlds: the elderly Sorin (Arkadina’s brother) expressing his wish that he hadn’t wasted his life with regrets for his lost youth; Polina (Masha’s mother) confessing to Dorn (the family friend and doctor) to live out their lives together, and Medvedenko complaining about his finances. Chekhov’s Seagull is a template for his later plays – culminating in his last two plays: Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. The world embodied in The Seagull sounds depressing but is quite intriguing if performed well with an ensemble: as with Chekhov, you get brief moments in these people’s lives for better or worse. Stoppard’s version of this great play is quite accessible and wonderful to read.
December 27, 2024
“What I’ve realized, Kostya, is that, with us, whether we’re writers or actors, what really counts is not dreaming about fame and glory… but stamina: knowing how to keep going despite everything, and having faith in yourself—I’ve got faith in myself now and that’s helped the pain, and when I think to myself, ‘You’re on the stage!’ then I’m not afraid of anything life can do to me.”
I’ve now read the four essential Chekhov plays, and, in a way, I’ve “read” this one before with Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird (a sort-of adaptation), which will forever have a place in my heart as the play that I used to audition for Stella Adler, kickstarting this new phase of my life. But as I was reading The Seagull, specifically this Tom Stoppard version of the play, I kept thinking to myself, “man, this is THE Chekhov play, isn’t it?”
“You know, I’ve lived a pick-and-choose sort of life, plenty of variety, I’m not complaining, but let me tell you, if I’d ever experienced that transcendent feeling artists get in the moment of inspiration, then I believe I would have had nothing but contempt for my physical life and everything that goes with it and I’d have left the earth behind me and soared away into the skies.”
Maybe it’s where I find myself in my life, but the musings and dialogue of this play, and its characters… I love it all so much. There’s a caustic brutality that all these characters inadvertently inflict on one another, and it all comes from art, love, or the lack of (good) art and the absence of love. These characters ‘suffer,’ but it’s technically not the greatest suffering imaginable — just broken hearts, unfulfilled dreams, and cuckolding right in front of your eyes.
“Loving without hope—waiting years on end for something, you don’t know what… Better off married and forget about love, I’ll have new troubles to blot out the old ones—and anyway, anything for a change. Shall we have another [drink]?”
It’s a comedy — or at least this was Chekhov’s original intention. As Stanislavski and other directors and ensembles tackled the piece over the years (after it was originally booed at its first performance in Russia), the play has taken on another life and identity of its own, and it’s viewed as tragic, dramatic, with such a sadboi central performance in Konstantin.
“Now promise me there’ll be no more (pulling an imaginary trigger) chk-chk! when I’m gone.”
It proves it comes down to performance and interpretation, because yes, this play is SO melodramatic. Characters’ choices truly are justifiable, but sometimes you just need to slap them across the face to knock some sense into them. But someone needs to slap ME across the face sometimes, too; I get the struggle of all of these characters. Their musings are beautiful, and I think Tom Stoppard’s version of the text captures sentiments so tenderly that I found myself nodding along with and empathizing with on every page.
“Hm… here you are talking about fame and fortune and some interesting, brilliant life I’m supposed to be having, but I’m afraid these sweet thoughts mean no more to me than sweet cakes, which I never eat.”
Gosh, that Shakespeare in Central Park creative team? I didn’t realize that THIS version I picked out at the Drama Book Shop was the version that was directed by Mike Nichols, with Philip Seymour Hoffman (!) as Konstantin, Meryl Streep as Arkadina, Natalie Portman as Nina, Christopher Walken as Sorin, Kevin Kline as Trigorin… the entire cast is divine, and it made reading this play a little easier, just imagining in my head each of them performing.
Konstantin is just a little sadboi and I love him so much. I just know I can play Konstantin or Con in SFB one day; frankly, I possess the energy and can be convincing as a pouty, woe-is-me, pathetic creative. But I love all of these characters so much; poor Konstantin, poor Masha, poor Nina, poor Arkadina, poor Dorn… poor everybody.
I’ve now read the four essential Chekhov plays, and, in a way, I’ve “read” this one before with Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird (a sort-of adaptation), which will forever have a place in my heart as the play that I used to audition for Stella Adler, kickstarting this new phase of my life. But as I was reading The Seagull, specifically this Tom Stoppard version of the play, I kept thinking to myself, “man, this is THE Chekhov play, isn’t it?”
“You know, I’ve lived a pick-and-choose sort of life, plenty of variety, I’m not complaining, but let me tell you, if I’d ever experienced that transcendent feeling artists get in the moment of inspiration, then I believe I would have had nothing but contempt for my physical life and everything that goes with it and I’d have left the earth behind me and soared away into the skies.”
Maybe it’s where I find myself in my life, but the musings and dialogue of this play, and its characters… I love it all so much. There’s a caustic brutality that all these characters inadvertently inflict on one another, and it all comes from art, love, or the lack of (good) art and the absence of love. These characters ‘suffer,’ but it’s technically not the greatest suffering imaginable — just broken hearts, unfulfilled dreams, and cuckolding right in front of your eyes.
“Loving without hope—waiting years on end for something, you don’t know what… Better off married and forget about love, I’ll have new troubles to blot out the old ones—and anyway, anything for a change. Shall we have another [drink]?”
It’s a comedy — or at least this was Chekhov’s original intention. As Stanislavski and other directors and ensembles tackled the piece over the years (after it was originally booed at its first performance in Russia), the play has taken on another life and identity of its own, and it’s viewed as tragic, dramatic, with such a sadboi central performance in Konstantin.
“Now promise me there’ll be no more (pulling an imaginary trigger) chk-chk! when I’m gone.”
It proves it comes down to performance and interpretation, because yes, this play is SO melodramatic. Characters’ choices truly are justifiable, but sometimes you just need to slap them across the face to knock some sense into them. But someone needs to slap ME across the face sometimes, too; I get the struggle of all of these characters. Their musings are beautiful, and I think Tom Stoppard’s version of the text captures sentiments so tenderly that I found myself nodding along with and empathizing with on every page.
“Hm… here you are talking about fame and fortune and some interesting, brilliant life I’m supposed to be having, but I’m afraid these sweet thoughts mean no more to me than sweet cakes, which I never eat.”
Gosh, that Shakespeare in Central Park creative team? I didn’t realize that THIS version I picked out at the Drama Book Shop was the version that was directed by Mike Nichols, with Philip Seymour Hoffman (!) as Konstantin, Meryl Streep as Arkadina, Natalie Portman as Nina, Christopher Walken as Sorin, Kevin Kline as Trigorin… the entire cast is divine, and it made reading this play a little easier, just imagining in my head each of them performing.
Konstantin is just a little sadboi and I love him so much. I just know I can play Konstantin or Con in SFB one day; frankly, I possess the energy and can be convincing as a pouty, woe-is-me, pathetic creative. But I love all of these characters so much; poor Konstantin, poor Masha, poor Nina, poor Arkadina, poor Dorn… poor everybody.
May 14, 2018
Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, as translated by Tom Stoppard, is about what started out as a group of friends gathering at an estate to watch a play written by fledgling writer Konstantin soon descends and unravels all whom are involved.
I was disappointed with The Seagull. At times, I found it boring. However, I did enjoy some things. I liked the character of Nina. Her character goes through quite the unraveling arc of hopeful actress to paranoid mess.
I enjoyed the last part, Act Four. I liked the time jump which adequately showed how much these characters changed. The ending was especially good. However, with all of these points, I still didn't like it.
I was disappointed with The Seagull. At times, I found it boring. However, I did enjoy some things. I liked the character of Nina. Her character goes through quite the unraveling arc of hopeful actress to paranoid mess.
I enjoyed the last part, Act Four. I liked the time jump which adequately showed how much these characters changed. The ending was especially good. However, with all of these points, I still didn't like it.
May 30, 2020
I did not compare this word for word with the original Russian. But when I did to seek clarity, I often found that the translation altered the meaning significantly. I couldn’t understand Stoppard’s choices. I also don’t understand why he left out Chekhov’s stage directions. A director is free to ignore them, of course, but why not include the playwright’s intentions? I found that the original stage directions sometimes conveyed additional meaning in terms of mood and tone that would have been helpful.
February 5, 2021
This one was one for school, but like, it was still interesting. It was a bit hard to keep names and stuff clear at the beginning and it was like, everything’s happening while also nothing is happening, but it was an interesting play to read. The ending, wow. I don’t know if I didn’t except it or what, but it was a bit of a shock to read it.
February 13, 2025
Heartbreak, agony, and all things like that. Put this on hold at the library and checked out The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor off the shelf. These works read back to back complimented each other incredibly.
Imagery of seagulls and water birds throughout. The agony of loss and rejection, fear, the pain stemming from giving love without ever receiving it.
Imagery of seagulls and water birds throughout. The agony of loss and rejection, fear, the pain stemming from giving love without ever receiving it.
October 27, 2022
Playwright Tom Stoppard here provides a beautifully accessible, open, friendly version of Chekhov's The Seagull. This is a play where everybody's right and everybody's wrong--precisely the profoundly funny and truthful slice of life that its original author intended.
January 28, 2026
this was a very interesting read! definitely made me stop and think for a moment. if i’d seen this live, boy oh boy it probably would have changed my life. but when reading i think it didn’t hit as much. overall, 3.2/5⭐️
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May 19, 2020Play.
Adaptation of The Seagull by Anton Chekov.
Adaptation of The Seagull by Anton Chekov.
June 11, 2020
Heartbreaking, disappointing and fantastic.
November 18, 2023
I like popular things because they are good.
July 20, 2025
Why are all “comedies” so sad
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews