Premiere | A.P.Čehov: The Seagull

PREMIERE

Festival Drama Ensemble

A.P.Čehov: The Seagull

Translation and dramaturgy: Lada Kaštelan

Director: Janusz Kica

Scenography: Marko Japelj

Costume designer: Doris Kristić

Composer: Hrvoje Nikšić

Lighting designer: Aleksandar Čavlek

Assistant director: Antonela Tošić

Assistant set designer: Lin Martin Japelj

Assistant costume designer: Petra Bobić

Stage manager: Roko Grbin

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Irina Nikolaevna Arkadina: Nina Violić

Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov, her son: Bernard Tomić

Pyotr Nikolaevich Sorin, her brother: Filip Šovagović

Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaja, daughter of a rich landowner: Ružica Maurus

Ilya Afanasevich Shamrayev, manager of Sorin's estate: Nikša Butijer

Polina Andreevna, his wife: Doris Šarić-Kukuljica

Maša, their daughter: Tena Nemet Brankov

Boris Aleksejevič Trigorin, a novelist: Janko Popović Volarić

Yevgenij Sergejevič Dorn, a doctor: Elvis Bošnjak

Semjon Semjonovič Medvedenko, a teacher: Igor Kovač

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In the summer of 1895, the thirty-five-year-old Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, a writer and physician,retired to his summer residence in Melikhovo to write a play commissioned by a Petersburg theatre. Seagulls flew over him from the nearby lakes, a dog barked, and friends, mostly actors and writers, occasionally came to visit him, bringing along their love and artistic problems, the same as his own (letters and notes testifying to this are available in the archives). He gave those problems to the characters of the play he was writing, as if using them to perform some diagnostic procedure on himself, delving deep and reaching the very core of things. Some of the characters are artists, famous and successful, some are not, some would like to be at all costs, some regret that they are not. A famous actress, a successful writer, an ambitious young writer, a young aspiring actress, a doctor, a retired lawyer, an estate manager, his wife and daughter, a teacher. They all have desires, fears,ambitions, dreams, doubts, obsessions, infatuations, crises, disappointments, illusions. The network of their relationships is dense and intertwined, and the constellation in which we find them at the beginning will have consequences for all of them; two years pass between the third and fourth acts and nothing remains the same. Chekhov shows us the fates of these characters with incredible simplicity and ease, he hands them over to us without explanation or making statements, and it is up to us to interpret them as we can, in accordance with our own experiences and character. And in accordance with the time we live in, the time that shapes us. The Seagull was premiered in Saint Petersburg in 1896, and for the next one hundred and thirty years it has not stopped landing on theatre stages around the world. Its themes are still relevant, today perhaps even more than ever, in our narcissistic society of spectacle obsessed with quick success, fame and visibility, permeated by an identity crisis and a constant search for something new. In any case, The Seagull is perhaps the most insightful piece of dramatic literature about theatre ever written. And theatre is always a metaphor for life, isn’t it?

Lada Kaštelan

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A great story about life and theater, which is at its core a story about women. Through the fates of Arkadina, Nina, Polina, Masha, Chekhov's deep affection for female characters is felt.

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