La mouette

The Seagull first ran out of steam in 1895, before becoming a triumphant success three years later, directed by Stanislavski. To impose such an innovative play at the time, it was necessary to invent a different kind of acting, to convey through elliptical stories the depth of a world stretched between passionate desires, immense aspirations, and the narrowness of reality, its mortifying heaviness. This Mouette follows on from Oncle Vanya, which Stéphane Braunschweig presented at the Odéon in 2020, and which put Doctor Astrov's ecological concerns at its heart. This time, the young writer Treplev's play - a vision of the end of the world - becomes the focal point of the work. Rejected and mocked by the other characters, it will not cease to resonate until the last act, even if its prescience has escaped them. Unless, like Claudius in Hamlet, they are afraid to look at what haunts them? In this society on borrowed time, that of more or less penniless landowners in the midst of a miserable Russia, some throw themselves wholeheartedly into love or art, others retreat into cynicism or bitterness, still others choose indifference.