‘I’m having absolutely nothing to do with the theatre or the human race. They can all go to hell.’ – Anton Chekhov During the turmoil of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Maria Chekhov, Anton’s sister, placed many of her late brother’s manuscripts and papers in a safety deposit box in Moscow. In 1921 Soviet scholars opened the box, and discovered a play. The title page was missing. The play they found has too many characters, too many themes, too much action. All in all, it’s generally dismissed as unstageable. Like life. A new play by Dead Centre, creators of the OBIE / Fringe First winning LIPPY.

Eminent critic Richard Gilman examines each of Chekhov's full-length plays, showing how they relate to each other, to Chekhov's short stories, and to his life. Gilman places the plays in the context of Russian and European drama and the larger culture of the period, and the reasons behind the enduring power of these classic works.

The play focuses on the lives of three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, young women of the Russian gentry who try to fill their days in order to construct a life that feels meaningful while surrounded by an array of military men, servants, husbands, suitors, and lovers, all of whom constitute a distractions from the passage of time and from the sisters' desire to return to their beloved Moscow.

Oh, Misha, it's terrible to be an educated woman. An educated woman with nothing to do. What am I here for? Why am I alive? They should make me a professor somewhere, or a director of something ... If I were a diplomat I'd turn the whole world upside down ... An educated woman ... And nothing to do. Village schoolmaster Mikhail Vasilyevich has it all: wit, intelligence, a comfortable and respectable life in provincial Russia, and the attentions of four beautiful women - one of whom is his devoted wife... As summer arrives and the seasonal festivities commence, the rapidly intensifying heat makes everyone giddy with sunlight, vodka – and passion. Michael Frayn's comedy of errors, drawn from Chekhov's untitled and posthumously discovered early play, is a tale of nineteenth-century Russian life replete with classic misunderstandings, irrepressible desires and nostalgia for a vanishing world. Wild Honey received its premiere in the National Theatre's Lyttelton space, London, on 19 July 1984. This edition was published for the revival at the Hampstead Theatre in December 2016.

Set in a small Russian town during the 1870s, this 20-character farce centers on a schoolteacher's romantic entanglements. Chekhov's first play holds the key to many themes revisited in his later dramas.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Swan Song" by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Alistair McDowall. Placing theatre history and performance analysis in such a context, Performing the Unstageable values what is not possible, and investigates the tricky underside of theatre's most fundamental function to bring things to the place of showing: the stage.

Curt Columbus endows these timeless dramas Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard with dialogue that is faithful to the russian original but dazzlingly attuned to contemporary audiences.

'Petit's words go right to the heart of Chekhov's technique ... Anyone looking for a key to understanding more about Michael Chekhov's technique will devour it.' – Jessica Cerullo, Michael Chekhov Association, NYC The Michael Chekhov technique is today seen as one of the most influential and inspiring methods of actor training in existence. In The Michael Chekhov Handbook, Lenard Petit draws on twenty years of teaching experience to unlock and illuminate this often complex technique. Petit uses four sections to guide those studying, working with or encountering Chekhov's approach for the first time: the aims of the technique – outlining the real aims of the actor the principles – acting with energy, imagination and creative power the tools – the actor’s use of the body and sensation the application – bringing the technique into practice The Michael Chekhov Handbook’s explanations and exercises will provide readers with the essential tools they need to put the rewarding principles of this technique into use. Lenard Petit is the Artistic Director of The Michael Chekhov Acting Studio in New York City. He teaches Chekhov Technique in the MFA and BFA Acting programs at Rutgers University. He was a contributor and co-creator of the DVD, Master Classes in The Michael Chekhov Technique, published by Routledge.

This book explores how doing dramaturgy is informed by today’s highly diverse field of theatre, dance and performance. It does so in dialogue with fourteen performances and their makers, tracing the thinking-through-practice that underlies these creations. The first part of the book looks at how dramaturgs participate in practices of thinking-making and introduces a dramaturgical mode of looking at performances and the processes in which they are created. The second part of the book discusses the performances and creative processes of Manuela Infante, Julian Hetzel, Ivo van Hove, Anouk van Dijk, Falk Richter, Milo Rau, Kris Verdonck, Death Centre, Hotel Modern, Jr.cE.sA.r , Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, Dries Verhoeven, the LGB Society of Mind, Sanja Mitrović, and Amanda Piña. Showing how ways of making and ways of doing dramaturgy mutually inform each other, this book is an essential resource for students and others aspiring to develop their own dramaturgical practice.