Drama / Characters: 9 male, 6 female

Scenery 2 Interiors / 1 Exterior

This poignant story of three provincial sisters who long with all their hearts to go to Moscow is classic theatre which has featured many of the world's great actresses and actors in the roles of Olga, Masha, Irina and Vershinin.

A masterpiece of modern drama, The Seagull dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina, her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin.6 women, 7 men

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

For Madame Ranevskaya, her cherry orchard is more than just land; it is her childhood, her memories and her life. Returning for the first time since her young son drowned there, she must come to terms with the fact that in order to free her family of debt the cherry orchard must be sold, the trees must be cleared and she and her family must prepare for life beyond the orchard. This touching and often hillarious play exercises the perfect balance of comedy and tragedy, through the characters, relationships and observations of society.

Spring 1903. Russia, And the cherry orchard is up for sale. Lyuboy Ranevskaya ran away to Paris five years ago after her only son drowned. Coming back to her beloved childhood home, she's faced with a mound of debts and an impossible decision - lose the family estate or carve up the land for summer holiday cottages. Lopakhin, the wealthy son of a former serf on the estate, sees a money-spinning opportunity and urges her to consider his scheme. But to Lyubov, the magnificent cherry orchard means everything. Written in 1904, The Cherry Orchard was Chekhov's last great comedy of life. This new version by Samuel Adamson was first produced by Oxford Stage Company on a UK tour and at London's Riverside Studios, with Geraldine James as Lyubov and Trevor Fox as Lopakhin.

Three Sisters, set in a rural backwater of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, is a play about dreams, hope, work and love. The sisters of the title dream of returning to Moscow, where their lives, they are certain, will be happier; in the meantime, the eldest and youngest, Olga and Irina, seek solace in work and the middle sister, Masha, married to the local schoolmaster, embarks on a hopeless but passionate affair with Vershinin, commander of the local army battery. Years pass, and their brother Andrei's wife, Natasha, slowly but inexorably ousts Olga and Irina from their family home as well as draining all life and hope from Andrei himself. At the end, rootless and loveless, the sisters face a bleak future with only one certainty: we cannot understand life, we must just endure it. Christopher Hampton's version of Chekhov's classic tragicomedy captures both the light, comic naturalism of its dialogue and the poetic melancholy of its atmosphere, a firm sense of the play's period balancing perfectly with a very modern clarity and economy of expression. It premi red at the Playhouse Theatre in 2003 with Kristin Scott-Thomas, Robert Bathurst, James Fleet and Eric Sykes among a distinguished cast.

Konstantin writes an avant-garde play for his beloved Nina to perform. His mother, Arkadina, a successful actress of the traditional school, and her novelist lover Trigorin, attend the first performance - and the meeting of Trigorin and Nina sets in train a series of tragi-comic events which leave no-one unaffected. Mike Poulton's adaptation of the Chekhov classic is fast-moving and funny; his ear for the rhythms, non sequiturs and tangential nature of real speech make it accessible, actable and indisputably modern.-6 women, 7 men

Mike Poulton's revised translation of Uncle Vanya was presented at The Print Room, London, in March 2012. In his introduction to the text he writes, "It's a measure of the greatness of this play that while translations lose their power, the original never does. It grows more moving, more gripping, and funnier on each reading. The more one works closely with it, the more secrets it reveals."4 women, 6 men

Glasgow, 1890. Andrew Baird calls upon Flora McNeil to settle a debt owed by her late husband. It is a bank holiday, however: no money! Baird is determined and refuses to leave; Flora has to resort to violence. Pistols are brought out for a duel; but first, Baird must teach her to shoot...1 woman, 2 men

Many of Chekhov's short stories, translated into English during the early years of the 20th century, do not retain the slavic flavor of the originals. Ross' translations reverse this trend. The stories focus on the development and unique existence of the male the trials and tribulations of adolescence, maturity, and old age. Chekhov masterfully takes complicated emotional experiences and presents them with his characteristic intensity and clarity, allowing readers to vicariously share the experience. His prose is truly poetic.
Stories of Men begins with "Volodya," a boy on the brink of independence, caught in an undercurrent of social displacement, who makes an irreversible mistake. Chekhov's stories of youth including "A Confession," "The Proud Man," and "The Guardian," a tale of artistic game-playing are full of comedy, inordinate vanity, and self-realization. Many of these very early stories were published in comic magazines under pseudonyms. Later his stories mature as do the characters in "Fear," "Promotion Preliminary Examination," and "The Wager," a political comparison of capital punishment and life imprisonment. Though only in his forties, Chekhov was ready to contemplate death in "A Tedious Tale."
Ross has made these works more accurate and accessible to the contemporary reader, while maintaining Chekhov's original intent of illustrating how time and circumstances can change men. With thirteen stories only now being presented to the English-speaking world, Stories of Men will excite all who love this classic writer's work.

In this, his third adaptation of a Chekhov play, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Mamet offers a contemporary, highly accessible version of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Working from a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik, Mamet has rediscovered the characteristically modern chords in this powerful play and breathes new life into a timeless classic. This is Chekhov rendered in direct, colloquial language marked by Mamet's finely tuned ear for dialogue.
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 distraction from the passage of time and from the sisters' desire to return to their beloved Moscow.
"Mamet's ear is famously impeccable, the dialogue is always authentic and convincing.... This adaptation] will help to undermine our silly critical notions of 'definitive' Chekhov. Mamet has made me rethink the play," said Robert Brustein in The New Republic of Mamet's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard. And the Chicago-Sun Times called it "audacious, consistently arresting."

Dramatic Comedy / Characters: 5 male, 4 female

Scenery: Interior/Exterior

This classic imparts an indelible picture of Chekhov's Russia and of his rich, bittersweet and deeply human characters.

"Blessedly free both of Slavisms and of up-to-date colloquialisms." -New York Times

"Simply wonderful." -Boston Globe"Mamet's adaptation is true and faithful to the Russian master in both tone and content." -Cape Cod Times

"Three Sisters" is Anton Chekhov's dramatic play written in 1900 and first performed in 1901. The story concerns the lives of an aristocratic family, the Prozorovs, who struggle to search for meaning in the modern world. The three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, along with their brother Andrei, are living in a small provincial town, yet they long to return to the urban sophistication of Moscow where they grew up. Chekhov's "Three Sisters" brilliantly depicts the lives and aspirations of the Prozorov family as they struggle to contend with the decline of the privileged class in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. A classic of Russian drama, "Three Sisters" is considered one of Chekhov's major works and remains one of his most popular plays.

The Cherry Orchard is the story of a mortgage, with the grounds and beautiful trees of the proud landowners going for sale at a public auction to pay off their debts to the boorish son of a peasant who has risen in the world. Mme Ranyevskayas family departs to take up their lives anew, leaving the old and forgotten Firs to die alone as the woodsmens axes thud ironically against the cherished trees.

In 1997, the celebrated contemporary playwright David Hare adapted a little-known play called Ivanov, and in doing so revealed the young Chekhov as a markedly different writer from the one English-speaking audiences were familiar with. Now Hare has produced a streamlined new version of Chekhov's freshman drama Platonov, an abandoned seven-hour manuscript in which Chekhov recasts Don Juan as a Russian schoolmaster. Again, we encounter a great writer who is funnier, more exuberant, and more wildly romantic than anyone expected.

Anton Chekhov's short novels are here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. "The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. "The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In "The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. "Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In "My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nauture culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.
In these five short novels, Chekhov's masterful storytelling and his profound understanding of human nature are brilliantly evinced.

"From the Hardcover edition.

This collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov contains The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6, The Black Monk, Anna on the Neck, The House with the Mezzanine, and In the Ravine. This is a dual-language book with the Russian text on the left side, and the English text on the right side of each spread. The texts are precisely synchronized. See more details about this and other books on Russian Novels in Russian and English page on Facebook.