One summer at a lakeside Russian estate, friends and family gather for a weekend in the countryside.

While everyone is caught up in passionately loving someone who loves somebody else, a tragicomedy unfolds about art, fame, human folly, and the eternal desire to live a purposeful life.

And it this set of complex and entangled set of shifting relationships in which the protagonists fall in and out of love with each other which gives the play/movie its real supremacy.

The complex psychological ebbs and flows of the assembled group keep each individual from achieving an unencumbered 'soaring' as experienced by a seagull: quintessentially their freedom. Each is caught in the tangled web of life.

The Seagull combines a star-studded cast which thrives with individual performances to deliver a masterful rendition of Chekhov's timeless classic.

Annette Bening's Irina is silly, charismatic, haughty, intelligent, strong and delicately sensitive. Her brother's country estate, where most of the drama unfolds, is a hive of suspicion, jealousy, transient loyalties and desires all presided over by Irina's imperious and complicated personality. She revels in cruelly and selfishly manipulating all those around her.

Corey Stoll deftly portrays Irina's lover, the illustrious writer Boris Trgorin. Brian Dennehy (as Sorin, Irina's unendingly dying brother) and Elisabeth Moss (as the lovelorn and disparaging Masha, daughter of the estate manager). Each is exquisite in their performance.

The requisite youthful, sexually-charged passion is provided by Billy Howle, as Irina's downhearted son, Konstantin, and Saoirse Ronan, as Nina, the young wholesome and innocent neighbour he ardently loves.

Konstantin's seduction of the ingénue Nina in a rowboat in the middle of a lake is powerful. The tension is palpable and redolent with an unstated sexual undercurrent.

Chekhov's words are powerful. The dialogue is sharp, crisp, subtle, biting and sometimes comedic. One example is when Masha announces 'I will tear this love out of my heart.' To which Konstantin asks: 'And how will you do that?' ' I will get married' Masha deftly replies.

Chekhov's psychological setting is sublimely acute. The disparate characters are narcissistic, occasionally discontented souls displaying all the foibles of human nature. And yet they are possessed with the insightful ability to be aware of the comical and futile aspects of their existence.

The Seagull explores, with comedy and melancholy, the obsessive nature of love, the tangled relationships between parents and children, and the transcendent value and psychic toll of art. It is a theatrical, fluid and faithful Chekhov adaptation.