Henry Carter Hull

Based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, Kama Ginkas’ astounding re-imagining highlights and builds off of the Chekhovian tension between the beauty of life and the tragedy of how it is lived. The story tells the the tragic tale of philosophy student Andrey Vasil'ich Kovrin (stage and screen star Sergey Makovetskiy).. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Kovrin decides to visit his childhood friend Tanya Pesotsky at the estate of her father. As...

The Playboy of the Western World is now regarded as a classic of Modernism and one of Ireland’s defining plays, but when it premiered in 1907, it shocked Dublin and inspired riots. See what made this play so controversial to its original audience—and why the play is a truly great work of art.

One of the most famous people in Ireland’s struggle for independence is Daniel O’Connell, a 19th-century politician who led the charge for Catholic emancipation as well as the effort to repeal Britain’s Act of Union. Learn about his activism, and then see how the Great Famine completely devastated the nation.

For their honeymoon, Anna and Mathieu traveled to Turkey with their camera in hand to learn about Mathieu’s Armenian heritage and to learn what modern day Turks think about the Armenian Genocide that occurred in 1915.Sadly, Turkey denies the Genocide for a variety of reasons including that the crimes was actually committed by Armenians against the Turks.Using footage from their trip mixed with interviews, news footage, historical documents and animation,...

First staged in 1904 by Konstantin Stanislavsky in the very theater and on the very stage of this production, director Adolf Shapiro's interpretation asks the question, where would the characters of this play live today years after their cherry orchard has been cut down? The answer, which lies in the material world created by set designer David Borovsky, is, of course, on the stage. Russian star, Renata Litvinova, in her debut theatrical performance,...

On St. Martin’s Lane in London, a popular spot for street performers, a busker (Charles Laughton) works a poor girl (Vivien Leigh) into his act. As her popularity rises, he guides her to stardom even though it means sacrificing his love for her.. Leigh is mesmerizing in her final film before Gone With the Wind..

From 1914 to 1921, while Ireland faced revolution at home, James Joyce was abroad, slowly laboring on his great masterpiece, Ulysses. In this first of three lectures about this famous epic and its relation to Irish history, Professor Conner provides a lucid overview of the story, its characters, its style, and its structure.

Follow Irish history through the age of rebellions sweeping across Europe and America, and find out how figures such as Wolfe Tone founded the quest for Irish republicanism. Delve into the cultural expressions of the 18th and 19th centuries, when poets and musicians kept ancient traditions alive.

Rene Clair’s sparkling comedy of manners is a witty, delicate, inspired satire on propriety and behavior in the bourgeois mind-set. Transposing the action of the perennial stage farce from 1851 to a summer wedding day in 1895 – the birth of cinema – Clair recalls detail, costume and design captured by the first movies. The Italian Straw Hat (Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie) triumphantly survives its 1927 journey from stage to screen; a dozen...

The combined nation of Poland and Lithuania was a powerful force in the 18th century—and its dissolution is one of the great crimes of the modern era. Civil strife provided the pretext for neighboring empires to swoop in and annex the nation. Consider the results of this partition and the political problem that would plague the region for the next century..