Monologue

Treplieff Monologue from The Sea-Gull

From The Sea-Gull by Anton Chekhov

male · anguished · 1:37 min

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She loves me, loves me not; loves--loves me not; loves--loves me not! You see, she doesn’t love me, and why should she? She likes life and love and gay clothes, and I am already twenty-five years old; a sufficient reminder to her that she is no longer young. When I am away she is only thirty-two, in my presence she is forty-three, and she hates me for it. She knows, too, that I despise the modern stage. She adores it, and imagines that she is working on it for the benefit of humanity and her sacred art, but to me the theatre is merely the vehicle of convention and prejudice. When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must needs run from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower that was about to crush him by its vulgarity.

About this piece

Treplieff grapples with his unrequited love and disillusionment with the modern theatre, expressing his feelings of inadequacy and frustration.

20s · sadness · love · identity · isolation · art

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