Gaivota

In an 1895 letter to Aleksei Suvorin, Chekhov mentions that he is writing a new play: “It’s a comedy, there are three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes (view over a lake); a great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.” The play premiered the following year, in Saint Petersburg, under the title The Seagull. At that time, it was a fiasco. However, great theatre flies high, and the strange “comedy” soon became a major classic of dramatic literature. To the Teatro São João stage now comes Gaviota, a free adaptation of Chekhov’s play that the Argentinian director Guillermo Cacace has created for an entirely female cast. This version intends to “attain the sublimity of the original by means of a whisper, capturing its essence and all that cannot be expressed by words, but nonetheless is there, on the surface”. One feels like saying, quoting the play’s protagonist, the poet Treplev: “What do you think of that for a theatre?”