Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Three
Sisters
Almeida
Theatre Spring 2019
Director Rebecca Frecknall's
vision of Chekhov's drama is a modernising one, occasionally awkward but
often successful in freeing the play from the burdens of a century of
too-often lazy and unimaginative stagings. But its major accomplishment is
to stay out of the way of the play.
That may sound like faint
praise, but in today's directorial climate a production that doesn't
impose an obtrusive and idiosyncratic filter between play and audience is
to be celebrated.
Frecknall's strength lies in
seeing the play and characters in modern terms, freeing them from
accumulated assumptions and type-casting.
The stage is all-but-bare,
the characters in plain modern dress. It may seem like a small thing, but
when most of the male characters are military, removing all the period
Chocolate Soldier uniforms rescues the play from an old-fashioned operetta
feel.
(Of course, along with
adaptor Cordelia Lynn's fluidly contemporary dialogue, all sense of time
and place and of Russian-ness is lost, but that proves no great
sacrifice.)
Director Frecknall has guided
her actors to escape traditional short-cuts and cliches of
characterisation in refreshing ways.
Take Olga, the eldest of the
eponymous sisters, for example. She is almost always played as a
dessicated old maid, but Patsy Ferran reminds us that she's only 28 at the
play's opening, and can sometimes think, feel and sound almost like a
teenager.
The basic arc of the play is
that everyone declines as time goes by and their small world shrinks even
further, and Ferran attractively gives Olga what too many previous Olgas
have lacked – a starting point from which to decline.
The youngest sister, Irina,
has traditionally been even more tightly limited by imagining and playing
her as an archetypal virginal ingenue and nothing more. But Ria Zmitrowicz
discovers that Irina has sensitivity and intelligence, with moments of
sounding more grown-up than anyone else.
In Shakespearean terms, she
is more Juliet than Ophelia, making the character and her emotional
adventure far more complex and simply more interesting than most Irinas
have been allowed.
The middle sister Masha has
generally been allowed more individuality and depth than the others, and
Pearl Chandra takes her a little further, playing her both more internally
than usual, using Masha's frequent silences to show us an intelligence
observing and processing what's going on around her, and more passionate.
To the extent that there is a
central plot event in the play it is Masha's doomed love affair with the
local garrison's new commanding officer. Chekhov makes it clear that this
is a love affair mainly of kindred spirits and intellects, but director
Frecknall and actor Chandra remind us that such a connection can be both
passionate and sexy.
This leads to one unfortunate
moment when Masha and Peter McDonald's Vershinin roll around the floor in
passionate embrace, but also to the very strong moment a little earlier
when they stand fifteen feet apart just talking and the sexual energy
between them is palpable.
These small but liberating
tweaks extend to other characters as well. In previous productions
Vershinin always threatened to become a bore, constantly speechifying
about his philosophical hobby horses. But simply by playing him as
casually chatting or occasionally thinking out loud rather than as
lecturing, Peter McDonald makes him more realistic and attractive.
Not everything works. As I
suggested, that on-the-floor moment is a bit too much, burdening Lois
Chimimba's Natasha with a working-class British accent goes in the wrong
direction by lazily typing her, and the mainly bare stage sometimes makes
the play seem to be all about constantly moving a few chairs around.
But if this happens to be your first Three Sisters you will see Chekhov's play unhindered by excessive 'interpretation' and if it is your second or third or tenth, you will find refreshing touches newly illuminating over-familiar bits of the play and characters.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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