The Seagull - Adaptations

Adaptations

The American playwright Tennessee Williams adapted the play as The Notebook of Trigorin, which premiered in 1981. That year, Thomas Kilroy's adaptation, The Seagull also premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor wrote an adaptation called His Greatness. Patrick Marmion's Pieta is a contemporary re-imagagining of the play.

Sidney Lumet's 1968 film The Sea Gull used Moura Budberg's translation.

The play was the basis for the 1974 opera The Seagull by Thomas Pasatieri to an English libretto by Kenward Elmslie.

It was made into a ballet by John Neumeier with his Hamburg Ballet company in June 2002. This version re-imagined the main characters as coming from the world of dance. Arkadina became a famous prima ballerina, Nina was a young dancer on the brink of her career. Konstantin appeared as a revolutionary young choreographer and Trigorin as an older, more conventional choreographer.

Emily Mann wrote and directed an adaptation called A Seagull in the Hamptons. The play premiered at the McCarter Theatre May 2008.

Libby Appel did a new version that premiered in 2011 at the Marin Theatre in Mill Valley using newly discovered material from Chekhov's original manuscripts. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, plays underwent censorship from two sources, the government censor and directors. The removed passages were saved in the archives of Russia, and unavailable till the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In 2011, Benedict Andrews re-imagined the work as being set in a modern Australian beach in his production of the play at Sydney's Belvoir Theatre, which starred Judy Davis, David Wenham and Maeve Darmody. He did this to explore the ideas of liminal space and time.