Three Sisters

by Anton Chekhov

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 16 May 2019

Rebecca Frecknall directs atsy Ferran as Olga, Pearl Chanda as Masha and Ria Zmitrowicz as Irina (the three sisters) with Freddie Meredith as their brother Andrey, Lois Chimimba as his wife Natasha, Peter McDonald as Vershinin and Elliott Levy as Masha's husband Kulygin in Cordelia Lynn's adaptation of Chekhov's play.

The provincial setting in which the children of an army officer, adrift without occupation or responsibility, fixated on returning to Moscow as the solution to their anxious unease, attempt to give meaning to their lives, is often presented in a nostalgic haze of imagined Russian-ness. Here, the setting is more abstract, the stage a raised square set at an angle in the Almeida's curved acting space, with virtually no props apart from chairs, with a stairway against the bare brick wall leading up to a notiona study where Andrey often sits brooding, perhaps aware of what is happening below him, perhaps just sulking or bemoaning the trajectory of his life. The sisters meanwhile attempt to cope - Olga, older and unmarried, gradually engulfed in teaching, Masha, married to the pedantic schoolmaster but disillusioned after her initial infatuation with him and desperate to revive excitement with a lover, and Irina, optimistic about work as an ennobling act but appalled by the banal realities of the jobs she tries.

It's tricky to manage the tone of this piece, to depict the incipient boredom without being boring, to present the sisters' at times frantic dismay at their lot without rendering them too pitiable or too irritatingly self-absorbed, to present the dismaying spectacle of Andrey's marriage to the parvenu Natasha without alienating us to both of them, and to show the society in which they move - soldiers billetted on the town, the schoolmaster, the town clerk, the family doctor, the servants - in a light which does not render them caricatures or bores. This production succeeds almost all the time in these aims, largely through being both unsentimental and unpatronising, and through giving the minor characters space to be themselves and not just background filling. This means that the relationships between the sisters themselves, and between them and the people they meet, build a coherent picture of the suffocating malaise that afflicts them all.

As so often with the great plays of the past, the modernity of this piece becomes strikingly apparent in a production which strips this play of the usual patina. The bare setting forces the actors to create all the atmosphere, and here the party-loving soldiers look like young men filling in time - the inevitable frustration of army life in peacetime - while the civilians worry about their prospects, or, in the case of the doctor, rely on world-weary cynicism, to see themselves through. The ensemble cast do a great job in rendering these lives believable; the people are by no means one-dimensional, which renders the distress some of them cause, which others of them must suffer, all the more poignant. Even Andrey, who could all too easily be just the spoilt son and brother of an indulgent family, shows despairing anger, rather than self-pity, in his great lamentation at the falling away of his promise; and of course Natasha, absorbed in her children and outmanoeuvring the sisters with a poisonous instinct for her own advancement, is reacting in part to their initial disdain. 

These and other vignettes all add a rcih texture to the interactions between the sisters themselves, here admirably acted: the cautious Olga, the passionate Masha disguising her frustrations with sarcasm, and the idealistic Irina nervously prepared to embark on a marriage without love as a means of escape, only to be cruelly deprived even of this option. It's an intriguing and satisfying exploration of this deeply resonant play.