This collection features Chekhov’s best-known short plays in brand new translations: three farces, two comic duologues and a monologue, all of them referred to by Chekhov as ‘vaudevilles’ and all written in the late 1880s before any of his great full-length plays. ‘I don’t much care for theatre,’ he wrote at the time, ‘but I do enjoy vaudevilles.’

The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding are all farces on the preposterous business of courtship and marriage. A Tragic Figure and Swansong are comic duologues: one about a civil servant sweltering in Moscow coping with the incessant demands of his family from their summer dacha, the other about a melancholy old actor perked up by memories of past glories. On the Evils of Tobacco is a bittersweet monologue in which a scientific lecture is hijacked by thoughts of domestic misery.

These accurate and actable translations by Chekhov expert Stephen Mulrine reveal a dramatist revelling in the broad comedy of human behaviour, a comedy which was refined in his later masterpieces.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a physician by training, is now considered the most notable 20th-century Russian dramatist. His major plays, all staged by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre, helped establish psychological realism in European theatre.

Stephen Mulrine is a Glasgow-born poet and playwright who has written extensively for radio and television, and published numerous translations, including a number of titles in the NHB Drama Classics series.