Published to tie in with the world premiere at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin

In Chekhov's tragi-comedy - perhaps his most popular play - the Gayev family is torn by powerful forces, forces rooted deep in history and in the society around them. Their estate is hopelessly in debt: urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, they struggle to act decisively. Tom Murphy's fine vernacular version allows us to re-imagine the events of the play in the last days of Anglo-Irish colonialism. It gives this great play vivid new life within our own history...

Ivanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard

"Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life," Chekhov once declared. "For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up." So it is that his plays express life through subtle construction, everyday dialogue, and an electrically charged atmosphere in which even the most casual words and actions assume great importance in his...

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904), a Russian physician, short-story writer, and playwright, wrote hundreds of stories that delved beneath the surface of Russian society, exposing the hidden motives of his characters and the ways in which prevailing social forces influenced their lives. This collection contains five of his most highly regarded stories, all from his maturity, and set in a variety of Tsarist Russian milieux.
Included are "The Black Monk" (1894), "The House with the Mezzanine" (1896), "The Peasants" (1897), "Gooseberries" (1898), and "The Lady with the Toy Dog" (1899). In...

The Cherry Orchard was first produced by the Moscow Art Theatre on Chekhov's last birthday, January 17, 1904. Since that time it has become one of the most critically admired and performed plays in the Western world, a high comedy whose principal theme, the passing of the old semifeudal order, is symbolized in the sale of the cherry orchard owned by Madame Ranevsky.
The play also functions as a magnificent showcase for Chekhov's acute observations of his characters' foibles and for quizzical ruminations on the approaching dissolution of the world of the Russian aristocracy and...

First performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, The Three Sisters probes the lives and dreams of Olga, Masha, and Irina, former Muscovites now living in a provincial town from which they long to escape. Their hopes for a life more suited to their cultivated tastes and sensibilities provide a touching counterpoint to the relentless flow of compromising events in the real world.
In this powerful play, a landmark of modern drama, Chekhov masterfully interweaves character and theme in subtle ways that make the work's climax seem as inevitable as it is deeply moving. It is...

First produced by the Moscow Art Theater in 1899, Uncle Vanya is one of Chekhov's greatest plays and a staple of the theatrical repertoire. Both structurally and psychologically compact, it is among the most expressive of the Russian playwright's dramatic works.
Set on an estate in nineteenth-century Russia, this deeply emotional tale of misplaced idealism and unrequited love concerns the complex interrelationships between a retired professor, his second wife, and his brother-in-law and daughter from a previous marriage. In deceptively mundane dialogue, the characters reveal...

One of the foremost dramatists of the 19th century, Russian author Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) created a body of work noted for its realistic dialogue and keen insights into human relationships. This collection of five one-act plays -- in the celebrated Constance Garnett translations -- shows Chekhov at his witty best.
The Anniversary takes a lively look behind the frenetic scenes at a bank: a man overburdened with errands from friends and family gives a nearly maddened but ludicrous account of his chores and obligations in An Unwilling Martyr; and The Wedding depicts...