The Seagull
Posted by: Erin in Research, Stoppard, tags: actor, art, artist, Artist Descending a Staircase, Chekhov, identity, metatheatrical, play-within-a-play, The Real Thing, The Seagull, TravestiesAs chance would have it, William and Mary’s Theatre department chose this semester to perform Stoppard’s translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. I hadn’t planned things this way, but the timing couldn’t be better! Though the play is obviously not original material for Stoppard, after watching the play, it is easy to see why he might be drawn to translate this work.
Like many of Stoppard’s own plays, Chekhov’s play is about creative people, actors and writers and artists, their twisted relationships, their struggle to find truth, and to justify their work to the world. Constantin’s struggle to define the art of the future must certainly appeal to a playwright who has written so many plays (Artist Descending a Staircase, Travesties) depicting similar-minded characters attempting to break through conventions and find the real meaning of art. Constantin makes the same argument as Annie in The Real Thing- that the professional artists such as Trigorin or Henry have made themselves into an elite and have blocked anyone who might disagree with them - they hold creation as something for the chosen few, and no one else can be an initiate. They place constraints on art and attempt to fit every artist into their narrow categories. In some ways, Chekhov’s play even prefigures Stoppards’ own - as when Chekhov’s characters discuss Constantin’s play which is ‘all lines, no action’ - an accusation frequently leveled against Stoppard. Chekhov employs a number of Stoppard’s favorite devices, such as the play-within-a-play. Stoppard’s frequent portrayals of the search for identity appear here in characters such as Constantin and Nina.
Chekhov considered The Seagull to be a comedy, despite what the audience might think - rather similar to Stoppard’s take on a number of his own plays, which he maintains were written to be comedies and should be taken as such, despite what might seem a tragic ending.
With any work-in-translation there is always the question of how much content comes from the original author and how much from the translation. I would be curious to see if other translations contain as many parallels to Stoppard’s plays as Stoppard’s translation does, or whether Stoppard tweaked the language to play up his favorite ideas. Regardless, it’s fascinating to see what parallels emerge between the two playwrights writing almost a century apart.
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