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.
