Chekhov Comedy Shorts

Chekhov's timeless comedy "A Reluctant Tragic Hero" sees Johnny Vegas portray an exasperated man looking for sympathy. Exhausted from running countless errands for friends and family, Ivan Ivanovitch Tolkachov visits his good friend Murashkin (played by Mackenzie Crook “The Office”) to let off steam. But he leaves with more problems than he started with.

Anton Chekhov’s "The Bear" tells the story of sudden love between a feisty widow and a boorish man who comes to collect her dead husband's debts. Chekhov is considered a master of nineteenth-century Russian realism. Yet much of his literary income was earned through performances of this comedic one-act play, which takes place in Elena Ivanovna Popova's drawing room exactly seven months after h...

One of Anton Chekhov's earliest plays, "The Dangers of Tobacco," sees Steve Coogan as a hen-pecked husband who, at his wife's insistence, delivers a speech about the dangers of smoking. But his focus soon strays, and we learn of his miserable life under her thumb. First performed in 1890, “The Proposal” is a fast-paced play featuring a nervous hypochondriac who visits his neighbor to ask for h...