In The Seagull, performed recently at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London, Chekhov asks the audiences to mourn the loss of a beautiful, innocent bird shot dead. It’s fair to say that many modern town dwellers will be thinking instead: wish I could do that.
A modern rendering of The Seagull would be a quite different piece of art: a pet-murdering, ice-cream-robbing, guano-splattering and, above all, squawking horror show of one species stealing another’s summer holiday happiness.
In most seaside towns the attempt to eat a chip can turn any tourist into Tippi Hedren in The Birds, but now that has taken on a more sinister twist. This season we have seen a Yorkshire terrier in Cornwall and a chihuahua in