"The Seagull," a spectacular failure on its first appearance, was the play that, on its second, established Anton Chekhov as an important and revolutionary dramatist. Here, amid the weariness of life in the country, the famous actress Arkadina presides over a household riven with desperate love, with dreams of success and dread of failure. It is her son, Konstantin, who one day shoots a seagull; it is the novelist Trigorin who will one day write the story of the seagull so casually killed; but it is Nina, the seagull herself, whose life to come will rewrite the story.

This new translation of "The Seagull"--made by Tom Stoppard for the Peter Hall Company at the Old Vic in 1997--was produced by The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City in 2001. The volume also contains an Introduction by Stoppard that indicates some of the problems translators have faced since the first English language" Seagull" in 1909