The Seagull - Paperback

by Duncan MacMillan (Adapted by), Thomas Ostermeier (Adapted by), Anton Chekhov (Author)

When celebrated actress Irina Arkádina arrives at her family's country estate for the summer, she finds herself caught in a perfect storm of conflicting desires.

Her playwright son, Konstantin, is struggling to step out of her shadow to pursue his own artistic ambitions. Her lover, Trigorin, a famous novelist, has entranced the aspiring young actress Nina, with whom Konstantin is in love. And complicating everything is Arkádina's own need to take center stage, in her personal life as well as her work.

As their lives entwine and they each grapple with their desires, ambitions and disappointments, Anton Chekhov's timeless play unfolds in a gripping tale of vanity, power and sacrifices made in the name of art.

Author Biography

Duncan Macmillan is an English playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays include: an adaptation (with Thomas Ostermeier) of Chekhov's The Seagull (Barbican Theatre, London, 2025); People, Places and Things (National Theatre / Headlong, 2015); Every Brilliant Thing (Paines Plough and Pentabus, 2013); an adaptation (with Robert Icke) of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Headlong / Nottingham Playhouse, 2013); and Lungs (Washington D.C., 2011).

Thomas Ostermeier is a German theatre director, acclaimed for his innovative and often iconoclastic productions of classic and contemporary plays. He is the Artistic Director of the Schaubühne in Berlin.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a physician by training, is now considered the most notable 20th-century Russian dramatist. His major plays, all staged by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre, helped establish psychological realism in European theatre.