Six degrees of separation from US playwright Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (below), born in 1911, was an American playwright and author of many stage classics, including A Streetcar Named Desire, which is being performed at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts until Saturday. Williams suffered from depression and feared going mad. He was briefly institutionalised in 1969, after a severe nervous breakdown, and never forgave his younger brother, Walter, for allowing him to be put into a madhouse. He died in 1983, after choking on the cap of a bottle of eye drops. Among his works was The Notebook of Trigorin, a play adapted from the 1895 drama The Seagull, by one of his favourite writers, Anton Chekhov …

Considered one of the greatest writers of short stories, Chekhov, born in 1860, produced humorous sketches and vignettes of contemporary Russian life using pseudonyms including Antosha Chekhonte and Man Without a Spleen. He was also a physician and often treated patients for free. The Russian playwright’s musings on an island claimed at various times by both Russia and Japan is the subject of the poem Chekhov on Sakhalin, by Seamus Heaney …

Born in 1939 in Northern Ireland, the first of nine children, Heaney went on to become a leading poet, essayist, critic, playwright, editor, translator and lecturer. As well as having once accompanied Sai Kung resident and recent My Life subject David McKirdy on a pub crawl of Wan Chai, in 1995, Heaney won the Nobel Prize for literature, “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. He was also one of the writers of the 2013 movie Stay, starring Taylor Schilling …