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 The TheatreguideLondon Reviews

For the archive, we have filed reviews of several productions and adaptations of The Three Sisters on this page. Scroll down for the one you want, or just browse.

Three Sisters
Playhouse Theatre Spring 2003

Chekhov's drama of frustration is one of the half-dozen greatest plays ever written, and Michael Blakemore's new production does it full justice.

Chekhov was virtually the first to recognise that most people's lives are made up of tiny sorrows and even tinier triumphs, and that, if observed with a combination of microscopic precision and immense sympathy, could be as moving as the grandest of tragedies. Here, a provincial family have the most modest of hopes - famously, they dream of moving to Moscow and enjoying big city life - and have even those quietly and almost imperceptibly stolen from them.

Olga hates her schoolteacher job and is ironically trapped by promotion to headmistress. Irina is prepared to settle into marriage with a decent young man she doesn't love, and has even that much denied her. Brother Andrei is exactly the sort of man who could be happy with a loving wife running his life for him, and chooses exactly the wrong woman. And Masha, so bored with her marriage that she hardly notices her unhappiness anymore, falls in love with a married soldier, only to have him posted elsewhere.

In short, almost nothing of any note happens - there is a very dramatic fire in mid-play, but Chekhov almost laughs at our expectations by keeping it offstage and eventually irrelevant - but by the end we have experienced the tragedy of small lives driven even smaller.

Under Michael Blakemore's direction, and with a new text by Christopher Hampton that only very rarely jars on the ear with anachronisms, this production is much warmer and more natural-sounding than many, as even the secondary characters are given an unusual reality and depth. Kristin Scott Thomas, the obligatory movie star without whom serious plays can¹t be done in the West End these days, is a particularly subtle and moving Masha. Frozen-faced and hard-edged at the start, she betrays her growing love for  Robert Bathurst's Vershinin by the way her eyes come alive and she can't help grinning with idiotic pride and delight whenever he goes off on one of his attempts at philosophising.

Bathurst, in turn, makes Vershinin less pompous and more likeable than he is often played, letting us see what there is to fall in love with in him. That breaking with the way the roles are too often played - not just for variety's sake, but to discover new humanity in the characters - runs through most of the performances. Kate Burton's Olga is not a desiccated spinster (She's only 28, after all), but a woman who has never expected much of life; while Madeleine Worrall's Irina isn't the usual fairy princess, but a young woman who already half-senses that life will disappoint her.

In the large and almost uniformly strong cast, Tobias Menzies is an amiable Tusenbach, while Tom Beard resists the temptation almost every other Solyony falls into, of playing him as feral villain from the start; instead, he's just socially inept, and driven to anger by his own inability to be as personable as he'd like to be. James Fleet reminds us that Masha's husband is well-meaning and loving man who can't help it if he's no romantic hero.

I'll end where I began. Three Sisters is one of the greatest plays ever written by anyone, anywhere, anytime. It is not just a good-for-you classic. If you give yourself to it, it will move you in ways few others can. And this is just about as good a production as you could ask for.

Gerald Berkowitz

Three Sisters
Lyttelton Theatre, Autumn 2003

Quite simply one of the handful of greatest plays ever written, Chekhov's heartrending study in the slow sinking into inertia has sometimes suffered in the past from a kind of solidifying over-familiarity. Just as Hamlet always mopes around in his black costume, the titular sisters are too often stereotyped into the spinster, the passionate one and the virgin, while other characters are also typed by tradition, leaving too little room for actors and directors to make them come alive.

So a major success of Katie Mitchell's new production at the National Theatre is that the characters all look fresh and new. Mitchell has flattened out some of the artificial distinctions among the sisters, so we see them as more similar than different - three women (Lorraine Ashbourne, Eve Best, Anna Maxwell Martin) with no more than an eight year age range between them, all dreaming of escape from their provincial lives while unable to resist the pull of stasis and inertia.

The fact that they are all having the same tragic experience is more significant than the relatively minor differences between them, and this is the first production I've seen that made that so clear and moving.

Other characters are similarly freshened. Lucy Whybrow's Natasha is not the vulgar witch of too many productions, but a somewhat more subdued villainess, going her own way more out of blind self-absorption than malice. Ben Daniels' Vershinin may be a bit too handsome in a Chocolate Soldier way - Masha is meant to be attracted to his mind, not his appearance - but he is also not quite so foolish in his compulsive philosophising as Vershinins tend to be; and much the same is true of Paul Hilton's amiable Baron and Angus Wright's earnest and sympathetic schoolmaster.

The effect at first is of a kind of flattening, as those who know the play are disappointed and disoriented by the absence of familiar signposts. But quickly one adjusts and finds the play coming alive in fresh, new ways. Stripped of the melodramatic stereotypes, it is much more real, and the sense of quiet inevitability to everyone's failure to achieve their most modest of dreams is all the more tragic.

The freshness is helped considerably by a new translation by Nicholas Wright that is somewhat more liberal than most in paraphrasing, and finding fresh new alternatives to some over-familiar lines, making us quite literally hear them for the first time. (He slips only once, when Masha's dismissing Natasha as a 'small town bitch' hurts the ear.)

Director Mitchell also slips a couple of times, when she tries too hard to be fresh or to unnecessarily underline a point. Because she believes the play is about the inexorable pressure of time, some scenes are punctuated by an incongruous slow-motion sequence. Because she feels the characters are trapped, acts begin and end with the sound of a prison door slamming. On the other hand, interpolating allusions to Swan Lake, by having a mock performance at the First Act party, does add an effective touch of tragic foreboding.

Gerald Berkowitz

3 Sisters on Hope Street
Hampstead Theatre Spring 2008

This new play by Diane Samuels and Tracy-Ann Oberman is openly an adaptation of Chekhov's classic, the provincial Russians yearning for Moscow in the 1890s transformed into Liverpool Jews dreaming of New York in the late 1940s.

That culture shift apart, the adaptation is a very close one, character for character, scene for scene, sometimes line for line.

The visiting soldiers are now American GIs, the offstage fire in Act Three is now an anti-Semitic riot, the plans of Tusenbach and Irina for a future of meaningful work now focus on Palestine, but essentially this is straight Chekhov in semi-modern dress.

Which raises the question 'Why?' Does the Jewish context illuminate Chekhov or Chekhov's structure illuminate the Jewish experience in 1946?

And the answer is essentially 'No'. What we have are two separate plays, one by Chekhov and one about English Jews, uneasily sharing the same stage and our attention.

Now, they are both worthy of our attention, in different ways, but their marriage is strained enough that the author-adapters might well have done better to begin their play afresh.

All the dramatic and emotional power of the evening comes from Chekhov. Witnessing May/Masha's doomed love for Vince/Vershunin, or the equally but differently doomed hopes of Rita/Irina and Tush/Tusenbach, or the decline into cuckolded nonentity of Arnold/Andrei is as moving as it is in any production of Chekhov's play.

On the other hand, it is interesting and thought-provoking to be told that many people, military and civilian, found peacetime disorienting after the intensity of war, and that some Jews might actually have had the advantage of being able to channel their energy and dedication toward Israel.

So, as long as it doesn't disturb you that your heart is engaged here and your brain engaged there, you can find a lot to hold you through the almost three hours of this adaptation.

Director Lindsay Posner anchors the play in its time and place while letting Chekhov's structure and rhythms prevail. Suzan Sylvester captures all the desperation of a May who senses a last chance being offered and taken away at age 35, while Finbar Lynch makes Vince quietly and unobtrusively attractive.

The role of Irina is underwritten in Chekhov, and Samantha Robinson can't do much with her counterpart, though Russell Bentley rightly makes Tush both earnest and a bit silly.

One of the few changes that actually enriches a character explains the Solyony figure's sourness by making him one of the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz, and Gerard Monaco makes us feel for a man who has seen Hell and now can't see anything else. The role of the old doctor/boarder, here Uncle Nate, is given more prominence than in the original, but all the charm and expertise of Philip Voss can't disguise the fact that he's an irrelevant time-filler.

Gerald Berkowitz

Sisters/Others
Young Vic Theatre and tour 2000

A too-infrequent pleasure of fringe theatre is the occasional company with the experience, erudition and imagination to do something really interesting with a classic. It's easy enough to do one more modern-dress Shakespeare, say, but to find a way to reinvent an overly familiar text is far more rare.

Now, if you don't know Chekhov's Three Sisters very well, there's not much point in seeing an alternative production. Even though there's a synopsis of the original in Scarlet Theatre's programme, you'll have trouble following what goes on, and certainly won't get some of the allusions or jokes.

But if you do know the play (it's the one about the three provincial sisters who dream of going to Moscow but sit ineffectually while their brother's bride takes over the house and two of them lose their chances at romance), Scarlet's twin deconstructions of Chekhov, "composed" by Andrzej Sadowski and directed by Katarzyna Deszcz, combine an ironically bemused distance with flashes of intense sensitivity to the original.

They're actually two independent pieces. The first play is essentially a highly concentrated precis of The Three Sisters, with all the male characters left out. What's left are the sisters and the sister-in-law, mainly standing or sitting in pinspots, speaking selected lines from the original and providing instant characterizations.

Olga muses, Masha paces, Irena giggles girlishly, Natasha bustles, and no one gets to Moscow. There are several deliberate laughs and some unintended ones, and moments of surprising intensity. Natasha's growing power, for example, is beautifully captured in a couple of quick strokes: she begins by nervously speaking every line twice, in the (correct) assumption that the others tend to ignore her, and later adopts the posture of military martinet. And the highly condensed text makes innocent lines like "Good night" or "I'm so tired" resonate with the unspoken subtext of the omitted scenes (that's part of what I mean by your having to know the original).

The second play, Others, does the same thing with Chekhov's male characters, only with the added complication of moving backwards, starting with the bleakness of Chekhov's ending and passing through key scenes in reverse order, to the innocent celebrations of his Act One.

Again the four men (the brother Andrey is omitted) are reduced to their semicomic essence - newcomer Vershunin constantly enters and exits, the doctor bemoans the pointlessness of life, overly-intense Soliony wipes his hands, the doomed Baron is irresolute.

Others is inevitably a thinner play than Sisters, since it is, after all, working with secondary characters from Chekhov, but like its partner play, it has strong moments. Much of the humour comes from the sudden non sequiturs of the editing and reverse order, while serious overtones are drawn from the men's military regimentation.

As the one figure who develops in Sisters, Carmelle McAree's Natasha shows the most life, while Edward Halstead's existence-weary doctor sets the tone of Others. Moving through both plays, doubling as servant and comic stage-manager-cum-chorus, Jane Guernier establishes and maintains ironic distance.

At an hour each, both plays are a bit too long for their fragile conceits, and could benefit from just a few minutes' tightening.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - The Three Sisters - Playhouse 2003
Review - The Three Sisters - National 2003
Review - 3 Sisters on Hope Street - Hampstead 2008
Review - Sisters and Others - Young Vic 2000