The Seagull

The Seagull (Russian: Ча́йка, tr. Cháyka) is a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896. The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatizes the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev.
Like Chekhov's other full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully-developed characters. In contrast to the melodrama of mainstream 19th-century theatre, lurid actions (such as Konstantin's suicide attempts) are not shown onstage. Characters tend to speak in subtext rather than directly.[1] The character Trigorin is considered one of Chekhov's greatest male roles. The English title for the play The Seagull is a potentially misleading translation of the title from its original Russian. Although the words "gull" and "seagull" are often used interchangeably in English, the text of the play makes no mention of the sea and is set on an estate somewhere in the inland regions of central Russia or Ukraine. The titular gull in question was likely meant by Chekov to be a black-headed gull or common gull. A more exact translation of the title would thus be The Gull, as the word "seagull" could erroneously evoke maritime connotations when no such imagery was intended by the playwright.