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.

Travesties

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 12 November 2016

This revival of Stoppard's coruscating 1974 play inspired by the coincidental presence of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Zurich in 1917 is directed by Patrick Marber and features Tom Hollander as Henry Carr, Amy Morgan as his sister Gwendolen, Tim Wallers as his servant Bennett, Peter McDonald as Joyce, Clare Foster as his amanuensis Cecily, Forbes Masson as Lenin, Sarah Quist as his wife Nadya, and Freddie Fox as Tzara.

Joyce really was the business manager of an amateur theatrical group which presented The Importance of Being Earnest; Carr (a member of the British diplomatic staff in Zurich) really did take part in the play and there was a squabble between them about finances. From this situation, together with the fact that Lenin departed from Zurich in late 1917 with the connivance of Germany to make his way to the Russia to instigate the Bolshevik revolution, and the fact that Tristan Tzara, the notorious Dadaist, was also in the city, Stoppard constructed a play in which Carr reminisces about his interactions with all three men - though it is clear that his memories are highly questionable.