#the seagull

Shetland (Phyllis Brennan), Flowers (Aunty Viv), New Blood (Eleanor Davies), The Seagull (Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina), The Carer (Milly), The Snow Queen (Herself – Director), Grantchester (Aunt Cece), The Last Dragonslayer (President of StuffCo)

Anna Chancellor on screen and stage and behind the scenes in 2016

Anna Chancellor discusses the Young Chekhov Trilogy at the premiere of The Carer

Materials from the premiere of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1898.

Чайка 

премьера 17 декабря 1898 года

постановка Константина Станиславского и Владимира Немировича-Данченко

фотографии предоставлены Музеем МХТ

The Seagull

premiere December 17 1898

directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko

photos provided by Moscow Art Theatre Museum

First day of summer vibes.

Larry Pine and Laura Heisler in Emily Mann’s A Seagull in the Hamptons, 2007. Photo by T. Charles Erickson

Phil with The Seagull director Mike Nichols and other cast members, including Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Christopher Walken, John Goodman, Kevin Kline, Marcia Gay Harden, Debra Monk, Larry Pine, and Stephen Spinella.

Nichols’ production of Anton Chekhov’s 1895 tragicomic play ran in August 2001 at the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, NYC. The tickets were free (as part of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park series) and people camped overnight for the chance to see this show, which had phenomenal reviews. There was talk of taking the show to Broadway (they added a week of shows due to demand), but conflicting schedules prevented that production (Phil himself directed off-Broadway that fall).

PSH played the abstract playwright Konstantin Treplev. From John Lahr’s review in The New Yorker:

The most complex [character] is Konstantin (the prodigiously talented Philip Seymour Hoffman)… Although the character is a mere twenty-five, Hoffman plays him as a furtive, exhausted man-child—a combustible combination of panic and petulance… Konstantin’s wayward infantile feelings—his bitter and idealized love for his self-centered mother; his Oedipal rage at Trigorin (his mother’s lover); his intoxicated infatuation with Nina, who performs in his play; his fierce self-hatred, alternating with omnipotent arrogance—are eloquently parsed by Hoffman.