The seagull

The Seagull premieres to St. Petersburg on October 17, 1896. It is a disaster. In the preface to the book Anton Chekhov. Life Through Letters (Einaudi), Natalia Ginzburg writes, "People laughed at the most dramatic moments. Every sentence was greeted with whistles and deafening screams. The actors acted terrified (the hostility of the audience had to so intimidated the actress Vera Komissarževskaya, in the role of Nina, from made her lose her voice, ed.), each forgot his lines, each was oblivious to his part.

At the end of the second act Chekhov left. He ate something in a restaurant, alone. Then he went to walking through the snow-filled streets. (...) The next day he took a train to Moscow." Three days later, there was a second performance, and it went well. A "colossal success."

But to St. Petersburg Chekhov did not return. "That night, with the screaming and the laughter and the booing, he had not erased it from his memory."

Two years later, an old friend of Chekhov's, Nemirovič-Dančenko, a professor of dramatic art, wrote him a letter. With the director and actor Stanislavsky he had founded a theater, called the "Folk Art Theater," which shortly afterwards would change its name to the "Moscow Art Theater." He intended to stage The Seagull. Chekhov at first refused, the memory of the laughter and booing "still tearing him apart," but eventually agreed. On January 17, 1989, the play debuted at the Art Theater. And it is a triumph.

Čechov succeeds to in being "contemporary" like few other theater writers, because of the themes addressed in his "comedies" and because of that sense of restlessness, of inadequacy -- of being "out of sync," dissonant with his own time -- that his characters convey to us. Today more than ever. Says Leonardo Lidi, actor and director who signs adaptation and direction of the new production of the Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria with ERT / Teatro Nazionale and the Teatro Stabile di Torino - Teatro Nazionale, in collaboration with Festival dei Due Mondi: "The Seagull is the text that really made me fall in love with theater, my all-time favorite. It is true, I say this about many plays, but in this work I can to identify everything about theater that fascinates me. The very first approach was with the character of Konstantìn who seeks revolution in classicism: from young acting student it is this aspect that most fascinated me. Today I almost laugh at that me back then; over time the interest shifted to the various characters that inhabit the text and their dynamics. I think of the theme of theater present in Konstantìn and his mother Irina Arkadina, or to that of playwriting in Trigorin. Chekhov speaks to all times and ages of life, and it matters little that the first performance of The Seagull was a resounding failure: it applies to many masterpieces of theater. The real revolutionaries theaters emptied them, see Ibsen with his Spectres or D'Annunzio with The Dead City." Both classics with which Lidi, winner in 2017 of the call for directors under 30 of the Biennale College - Teatro directed from Antonio Latella, has bravely confronted.

Unrequited love is the driving force behindopera. Chekhov writes to about The Seagull to his friend Suvorin on Oct. 21, 1895: "It is a comedy, there are three female parts, six male parts, four acts, a landscape (lake view); much talk about literature, little action, tons of love." Konstantìn desperately longs for the love of his mother, actress Irina Arkadina, but does not receive it; Nina falls in love with novelist Trigorin, Arkadina's lover, with whom she will live for a time to Moscow, before he abandons her to return to the ex; who wants Trigorin's love but has to settle for dominance over him: he loves no one. Lidi is right: "We could end with the first scene of Maša and Medvedenko: Why does she always go dressed in black? It is mourning for my life. I am unhappy. That's all there is to it, like the song by Jannacci that accompanied me in the study... At the end of the day, those who love are always defeated, and the defeat of love has such sincerity that it unites most of us." But The Seagull is also aopera metatheatrical, aopera reflecting on the need for a profound renewal of dramatic writing and stage conception. "Theater cannot be done to less. New forms are needed," Konstantìn and his uncle Sòrin, in whose villa the action takes place, say in the first act. "I don't like to talk about the theater in the theater, for me it is important to always get the message across that we need to make the theater palpitate in our present," Lidi stresses, "to be aware that we work for those who are there, without hiding behind the classic, without fear of going up against criticism. I opted for an unobtrusive rewrite," he continues, "a rewrite that makes everything plausible with respect to to us, trying to keep intact what still resonates in the present: there are authors who need a rewrite to resonate in the present. Chekhov is an exception: he laughs and cries with us; he never laughs at us. He empathizes. He is moved by the tenderness that pains us. He tells me that in the end there is nothing from to win, and that no situation can ever be managed to the end, that the control mania that so appeases us is perfectly useless. His greatness lies in keeping us company with the lives of the characters who inhabit his writings."

For Tolstoy, "Chekhov cannot be compared as an artist to any of the other Russian writers, Turgenev, Dostoevsky or myself. Like all impressionists, he possesses a form of his own. We see him inadvertently throw the colors he has to at hand, and we think those strokes of paint have nothing to to do with each other. But as soon as we step back and look from away, the impression is extraordinary: we are confronted to with a dazzling, irresistible painting." Tolstoy touches on a crucial point in Chekhov's aesthetic: his relationship with his readers. Writers such as Turgenev, Goncarov and even, up to to a certain point, Tolstoy himself, address to a passive reader. Chekhov, on the contrary, does not intend to explain anything, only to suggest. He demands the reader's constant cooperation, the goal from himself stated is to guide the reader to to think: "When I write, I focus on the reader, and I count that he will know how to add the subjective elements that are missing from my story himself (...) And why should we explain? Just knock, that's all; then the reader gets interested and starts to thinking again."

Confirms Lidi: "We must never forget the dynamic that Čechov weaves with the spectator, for a director this is fundamental. Čechov's spectators saw in his theater a "new" acting compared to to what they were used to, a young cast capable of surprising the audience: those actors on stage spoke as they did. This should make us reflect not so much on a cinematic aspect of the text but on what it means to be a spectator of one's own life, active or passive."

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Laura Zangarini