Theatre review: Three Sisters

Published on Thursday 25 March 2010 18:02

THREE SISTERS **** TRAVERSE THEATRE, EDINBURGH

THE British love their melancholy country house drama; so it's hardly surprising that the conventional British take on Chekhov has always involved plenty of white lace dresses, and shabbily-elegant garden furniture. There have been many attempts to liberate Chekhov from the samovar, of course – to update the plays, or inject some of the wild absurdism that is also part of his genius; but none, I think, more continuously interesting than Sean Holmes and Filter's new production from the Lyric, Hammersmith, playing at the Traverse this week.

It's not that the show dispenses with the traditional Chehovian trappings – in fact, they are all present. But on a thrillingly-open set, like a film studio sound stage, the company sends the whole traditional look and sound of Chekhov through a post-modern shredding machine; so that the vaguely 1920s period costumes come mixed with jeans and crash-helmets, and private conversations are suddenly amplified for us by roving boom-mikes or hidden microphones.

And the result is a version of Three Sisters that shakes itself free of any particular time or style, and puts the play in touch with strands of British acting rarely seen in Chekhov before; notably that wild sitcom surrealism that enables actors to be very funny indeed, while simultaneously dealing with great Chekhovian themes like death, depression, the failure of idealism, and catastrophic disappointment in love.

Poppy Miller, Romola Garai, and Clare Dunne, as the three sisters, move boldly over the surface of the story, often yelling their heads off exhilaratingly, like true Russians.

But it's in the tragi-comic marital misery of characters like their brother Andrei that this production really breaks new ground in the British response to Chekhov; and if it slightly loses impetus towards the play's bleak ending, that seems like a price worth paying for the rich new insights it brings.