The first production of the The Seagull at the Alexandra Theatre in St. Petersburg on 17 October 1896 has come down in theatrical legend as a classic fiasco. But this is an exaggeration. The cast was strong, with Davydov (the original Ivanov) as the uncle Sorin, the popular comedian Varlamov (who had already played Lebedev in Ivanov and Chubukov in The Proposal) as the overseer Shamrayev, the handsome jeune premier Roman Apollonsky as Treplyov, and the brilliant young actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya as Nina. During the scant week of rehearsals, Chekhov was in attendance, prompting the actors and correcting the director. Like most sensitive playwrights, he was dismayed by wasted rehearsal time and the actors' predilection for superficial characterisations that stunted his brainchildren; but by the last rehearsals his expectations had risen.
These expectations were dashed on opening night, for the spectators had come with expectations of their own, hoping to see their favorite comedienne Levkeyeva, whose benefit it was. They laughed, booed and whistled at whatever struck them as funny, from Nina's soliloquy to
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.
Chekhov's objections to the Moscow interpretation did not, however, spring from its style, but from the imbalance in meaning that Stanislavsky had induced. Although it contains a 'ton of love', The Seagull is not a soap opera about a triangular relationship or a romantic dramatisation of Trigorin's 'subject for a short story'. It is perhaps Chekhov's most personal play in its treatment of the artist's metier. The theme of splendours and miseries of artists is plainly struck by Nina at the start, when she explains why her parents won't let her come to Sorin's estate: 'They say this place is Bohemia'. Years of theatre-going, reviewing, dealing with performers and managers were distilled by Chekhov to create a density of metaphor for the artistic experience, for the contrasts between commercialism and idealism, facility and aspiration, purposeless talent and diligent mediocrity. Of the central characters, one is an aspiring playwright, another a successful and performed writer; one is an acclaimed star of the footlights, another a would-be actress.
Stanislavsky's black-and-white vision of the play also ran counter to Chekhov's attempt to create multiple heroes and multiple conflicts. Treplyov seems the protagonist because the play begins with his artistic credo and his moment of revolt, and it ends with his self-destruction. But in terms of stage time, he shares the limelight with many
other claimants, whose ambitions cancel out one another.
Nor can Nina be singled out as the one survivor who preserves her ideals in spite of all. The type of the victimised young girl, abandoned by her love and coming to a bad end, frequently recurred in Russian literature from Karamzin's Poor Liza (1792) onward. Often she was depicted as the ward of an older woman who, in her cruelty or wilful egoism, promotes the girl's downfalclass="underline" many plays of Ostrovsky and Potekhin feature such a pair, the relationship is subtly handled by Turgenev in A Month in the Country (1850). In The Seagull, the relationship is rarefied: it is Arkadina's example rather than her intention that sends Nina to Moscow, maternity and mumming.