SOURCE: Williams, Raymond. “Anton Chekhov.” In Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, pp. 101-11. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

In the following essay, from a work first published in England in 1968, Williams delineates the impact of The Seagull on the theater.

I regard the stage of today as mere routine and prejudice. When the curtain goes up and the gifted beings, the high priests of the sacred art, appear by electric light, in a room with three sides to it, representing how people eat, drink, love, walk, and wear their jackets; when they strive to squeeze out a moral from the flat vulgar pictures and the flat vulgar phrases, a little tiny moral, easy to comprehend and handy for home consumption; when in a thousand variations they offer me always the same thing over and over again—then I take to my heels and run, as Maupassant ran from...