An intriguing new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”

By J.W.S.W.

IN THE third act of “Three Sisters” Ivan Chebutykin, a bumbling old doctor, drunkenly knocks over a clock, smashing it to bits. In Anton Chekhov’s plays no prop is without symbolic weight, and the broken clock is a particularly rich (if unsubtle) symbol: a rupture with times past. In a new adaptation at the Almeida theatre in London, the broken clock also signifies a different kind of anachronism. Here, the fin-de-siècle listlessness of Chekhov’s play is partially relocated to the present. The characters speak in a contemporary vernacular, but they exchange traditional Russian silverware and dream of a future in which “women will wear trousers”.

The aim, presumably, is to emphasise the connections between Chekhov’s time and the 21st century, and the play does have much to say to angst-ridden millennials. The young protagonists are struggling to carve out a personal and political role for themselves. They are talked down to by an older generation that dismisses their concerns as unserious and narcissistic (as Cordelia Lynn, who has written the adaptation, said in an interview: “What does that remind you of?”) Chekhov’s plot centres on the attempts of the titular siblings to work, marry or adulterate their way out of a rural backwater, where they moved from their longed-for Moscow home. When a military garrison arrives in town, bringing with it the glamorous Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin (Peter McDonald) and Baron Tuzenbach (Shubham Saraf), the sisters see an escape route.

Pearl Chanda, Patsy Ferran and Ria Zmitrowicz give accomplished performances as Masha, Olga and Irina Sergeyevna respectively. As the girls’ lives wear on, their ambitions are thwarted. Masha’s acid tongue and intellectual conviction give way to melancholy and malaise, even as she pursues a love affair with Vershinin. Irina’s enthusiasm for work is ground down by the mundane reality of jobs in the telegraph office and local council.

The odd sibling out is brother Andrey, played with despondency by Freddie Meredith. Unlike his sisters, he marries for love, to local girl Natasha Ivanovna (Lois Chimimba). But he, too, ends up desperately unhappy, abandoning his dreams of academia as his gambling addiction, his children and his unfaithful wife consume his life. As Olga, Ms Ferran has the slighter part, perhaps surprisingly given her award-winning turn in Ms Frecknall’s last Almeida production, Tennesee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke”. In that play, every scene ratchets up the tension like a coiled spring. The Chekhov is an altogether different affair: images and plotlines spark in different directions, before darkening to ash.

The play works best when the pace is quick. In the first act, before the confessional speechifying gets properly underway, each scene moves energetically into the next, with most of the cast onstage. The third act injects another shot of energy, when a fire breaks out in the village. For the most part, however, the play is unavoidably cumbersome. Even as the production plays up the Beckettian verbosity, some absurdity remains. At the interval, one Almeida dramaturge commented that, had the text arrived on his desk from a new writer, he would have reached quickly for the red pen.

Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking interpretation of the material. In the production’s boldest anachronism, Chebutykin quotes T.S Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. The poem was written 15 years after Chekhov’s death, but it is a startling prism through which to view “Three Sisters”, itself a linguistic and structural patchwork. The characters miserably measure out their lives, in coffee spoons, shot glasses or baby bottles.

Of course, the great risk of staging a play about crushing ennui and profound dissatisfaction is the possibility of instilling those feelings in the audience. Despite the three-hour running time, a consistently strong cast helps this production to avoid that pitfall—narrowly. No easy answers are granted to the audience any more than to the characters. The protagonists try to escape, to advance or to return. All end up nightmarishly stuck, like the hands of a broken clock.

“Three Sisters” is at the Almeida until June 1st