Oxford Playhouse

Tuesday 9th March-Saturday 13th March, 7.30p.m.

“the very fact that the audience feels guilty, voyeuristic, intrusive, is a testament to the powerful staging.” Pooja Bharat ★★★★★

“The whole cast oozed quality but the highlight performance of the play was Romola Garai’s portrayal of the cantankerous and irritable middle sister Masha Prozorov, who injected moments of humour into the play.” Catherine Owen ★★★★★

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Three Sisters ★★★★★

Review by Pooja Bharat

I walked into the theatre and I immediately felt guilty. There was a man playing the piano; a woman reading on the sofa; a very messy living room – evidently just another evening in, and my being there felt voyeuristic and intrusive all at once. Much of ‘Three Sisters’, on at the Oxford Playhouse from the 9^th to the 13^th of March, feels the same way – the audience looks on unacknowledged, as a little nucleus of Russian domesticity plays out its drama of suffering and tragedy. As an adaptation of Chekov it is ‘imaginative’ enough, even if it is one that doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin.

The first two acts were superb – energetic and punctuated with just the right amounts of humour and philosophical pondering, all of which happens while Anfisa (Sandra Voe) set up the lunch table, or while the irritable Masha (Romola Garai of Atonement) read silently on the couch. Life goes on in the Prozorov household, even amidst monologues. ‘Three Sisters’ is perhaps a difficult script to enliven, but somehow they succeeded in doing it, through some fantastic acting – the angry Masha contrasted interestingly with the idealistic Irina (Clare Dunne), while Mark Theodore’s Vasily Solynoy stood out for me with his “cheep cheep cheep” moments of childish humour, and inane self-assertion.

But I had gone to the theatre expecting “evocative physicality and Filter’s trademark use of sound”, and this is not quite what I got. There were moments in which their use of sound seemed highly innovative – a part in Act 2 especially stands out, as the magnified and hugely ominous sound of a kettle boiling (and it was interesting to see how domestic and ‘daily’ a sound could suddenly forebode so much in the silence of the theatre) floods the audience’s hearing, as characters sit silently on stage, each involved in their own private struggle and suffering. It feels like an eternity, and it was one of the finest moments in the play: nuanced, subtle, delineating. But at other times, it was more difficult to understand what Filter were trying to do – why such a cacophony of music every time an act changed? Why not more moments like the kettle boiling? If anything, my gripe is that the rich potential for more enterprising musicality was perhaps not made use of – I would have eagerly welcomed more scenes with the symbolic finesse of that in Act 2.

Likewise (and my gripe here is, insolently, probably with Chekov’s script and not Lyric Hammersmith or Filter’s performance) the play dragged on a little too much. Three hours is long for any play, but the ending is almost palpably near in Act 4, only postponed repeatedly and frustratingly by each character’s outpouring of existential angst – after hearing “time must pass” for perhaps the fifth time, I began to wonder why it had to pass so very slowly. Act 4 truly lacked the energy that the preceding acts had shown, although this is a characteristic of a hugely monologic script and was rendered brilliantly by the actors themselves.

‘Three Sisters’ is however, despite the minor gripes, a very sound and good production for any theatre-lover or Chekov fan to go see. The acting (and I can only repeat this) is excellent; moments of staging are hugely exciting, especially given the seeming static difficulty of the script; some use of sound is amazing, and leaves you (as it did me) wanting only more of the same; the very fact that the audience feels guilty, voyeuristic, intrusive, is a testament to the powerful staging. Overall, this production is highly recommended to anyone who wants a good night at the theatre, and especially to any Chekov fan who wants to see an interesting though perhaps only mildly innovative take on the play.

Three Sisters ★★★★★

Review by Catherine Owen

‘Three Sisters’ by Anton Chekhov depicts the lives and dreams of the Prozorov family, who dream for escape from the dissatisfaction of their provincial existence to the promised land of Moscow. However as time passes and the characters begin to suffer from the consequences of their decisions, one begins to wonder if any of them will ever break free. In this play, either Chekhov has managed to thrust the feelings of suffocation and confinement onto the audience astoundingly well, or (and I write this facing potential violent abuse from all enthusiasts of the darling of Russian drama) that he’s just created a boring play. Chekhov seems to have missed the whole point of entertainment in the sense that he has created something more boring than the mundane, and therefore has created what seems to be a visual version of ‘The Archers’. When the characters complained of suppression from their lives that seem to drain them of even their worldly knowledge, I could identify with their emotions precisely as after the first two and a half hours I began to fail to see a point in my life where I wouldn’t be seated in the Oxford Playhouse auditorium.

However the aspect that saved the drama from total disaster, and caused me to endlessly hope for a meagre thread of direction and storyline in a plot-void play, was the acting, though it puzzles me why such a talented cast would bother with such a play. The whole cast oozed quality but the highlight performance of the play was Romola Garai’s portrayal of the cantankerous and irritable middle sister Masha Prozorov, who injected moments of humour into the play. Dramatic transformations of character were particularly well illustrated by Clare Dunne as the youngest sister Irina Prozorov, who in the initial scenes of the drama is saturated with optimism and endless wonder of her life’s potential, but ends as a character drained by her surroundings. Another stunning depiction of character development was Gemma Saunders as Natasha Ivanova who blossoms from an awkward, unconfident girl to confident, cruel woman who adopts authority over the Prozorov house.

Another asset to the production was the staging as the use of the entire space was visually effective and the odd assortment of items on the stage, such as three upright pianos in different stages of completion, added to the familiar sense of family clutter. However the use of music, obviously used to fill the lengthy set alterations, was odd as it jumped abruptly through various short extracts of songs without any smooth cohesion.

In conclusion, despite my criticism of the play itself I would in fact recommend the production purely on the grounds of the acting performances. However I do warn that one will inevitably experience a play that involves two halves of nothing- an impressive feat!