Chekhov’s first major play, a story of art, ego and love by a lake, is staged by candlelight in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by the team behind the Globe’s Three Sisters.
Caroline Steinbeis directs Chekhov’s The Seagull by candlelight in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside, opening on Friday 15 January 2027. Rory Mullarkey wrote the translation.
Written in 1895, it is generally held to be the first of Chekhov’s four major plays. An actress, her lover, her son who writes plays and a young woman who wants to act gather at a country house by a lake.
Its debt to Hamlet shows in a play within the play that goes badly wrong. The first night, at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in October 1896, was booed. Stanislavski’s staging for the Moscow Art Theatre two years later made it a triumph.
Steinbeis and Mullarkey made the Globe’s Three Sisters in the same room. The Playhouse is the Globe’s indoor theatre, and The Seagull plays there this winter beside King John.
Steinbeis, German-born and a recipient of the JMK Award, was the Royal Court’s International Associate and spent fifteen years as an associate director at Sheffield Theatres. Mullarkey’s earlier work for the Globe includes The Oresteia.
Nina’s line is the production’s epigraph: “If you ever need my life, then come and take it.”