The Seagull

In another life, Anton Chekhov would have made a great psychic. His observations of turn-of-the-century Russian society and the class rage boiling quietly under the surface (scratching at the scab of the characters' dissatisfactions and their elusive quest for happiness) feel spookily prophetic, considering his plays were written decades before the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Seagull depicts the conflicts between four characters: the famous (utterly mediocre) writer Boris Trigorin, the ingénu...