(The Schaubühne staging is also far tamer than “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s irreverent adaptation, which is transposed to the Catskill Mountains and is currently playing Off Broadway.) Instead, this production largely came to life with the purest and most economical of theatrical means: the individual and collective performances of the 10-person cast. In a surprisingly traditional staging of “The Seagull” that opened on Monday at the Berlin Schaubühne, Thomas Ostermeier ceded the floor to the actors, in a production that was free of the directorial interventions or distractions that classic works are often subjected to on German stages. Now a canonical work, “The Seagull” remains devilishly tricky to pull off, however, not because Chekhov’s theatrical form still confounds, but because of the difficulty of corralling an acting ensemble to play off each other with naturalness and ease while slipping between Chekhov’s shifting and overlapping emotional registers. His chamber drama, filled with unheroic, frustrated figures propelled by life’s bitter ironies rather than melodramatic flourishes, proved too much for the play’s first audience to bear. Sensitive, moody and a bit ridiculous, Konstantin isn’t exactly a mouthpiece for the great Russian author, although Chekhov was himself out to innovate and reform. Konstantin, the aspiring playwright in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” dreams of inventing “new forms” for the theater.

Chekhov play the seagull