Michael Frayn and the TV series "Making Faces", starring Eleanor Bron. He is now considered to be Britain's finest translator of Anton Chekhov ("The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters" and "The Cherry Orchard") as well as an early untitled work, which he titled "Wild Honey" (other translations of the work have called it "Platonov" or "Don Juan in the Russian Manner") and a number of Chekhov's smaller plays for an evening called "The Sneeze" (originally performed on the West End by Rowan Atkinson). He also translated Yuri Trifonov's play "Exchange", Leo Tolstoy's "The Fruits of Enlightenment", and Jean Anouilh's "Number One". In
Ann Dunnigan but Dunnigan contested that van Itallie's translation was nearly identical to hers, and sued him. In the settlement that followed, van Itallie accepted responsibility for the legal costs, and agreed to cease promotion of his version. Years later, van Itallie applied himself to new renderings of "The Cherry Orchard", "The Seagull", "Three Sisters", and "Uncle Vanya". In the introduction to Applause Books' 1995 compilation of these, van Itallie asserts that he "worked on "The Sea Gull", and later the other three plays, with a specially-made literal English translation and a selection of French translations." Dunnigan's final stage performance was in