The Seagull is currently being adapted into a film directed by Michael Mayer with a screenplay by Stephen Karam
This version of Chekhov's classic premiered in the US at New York's Central Park Delacorte Theatre with an all-star cast featuring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Natalie Portman. Crowds waited up to 15 hours for tickets. The adaptation was praised as “utterly faithful to the original” (New York Times), “Robustly funny and pleasingly fluid” (Variety), and “achingly sad and escapably tragic” (New York Daily News).
The Seagull is widely considered to be the first of Chekhov's four major plays, although the first production was a famous failure. Following Konstantin Stanislavsky's 1898 production for the Moscow Art Theatre, the play became a triumph, becoming “one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama” (Konstantin Rudnitsky).
Grove is republishing titles by Stoppard that were previously published by FSG (including Arcadia, Indian Ink, and The Real Thing) and updating our Stoppard backlist to give these books a fresh look. We are also publishing the old FSG titles in ebook for the first time.
