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| Eryn Jean Norvill as Masha. Alison Bell as Olga. Miranda Daughtry as Irina in the Sydney Theatre Company production of Three Sisters. Photo: Brett Boardman |
Three Sisters by Anton Chekov.
Translated and adapted by Andrew Upton. Directed by Kip Williams. Assistant director. Jada Alberts. Designer Alice Babidge. Lighting designer. Nick Schlieper. Composer and sound designer. The Sweats. Sound designer. Nate Edmondson. Voice and text coach. Charmian Gradwell. Sydney Theatre Company. The Drama Theatre. Sydney Opera House . November 10 – December 16 2017. Bookings: www.sydneytheatre.com.au or (02) 92501777.
Reviewed by
Peter Wilkins
To see Kip
Williams’s wonderfully staged production of Chekov’s Three Sisters in Andrew Upton’s fiery and theatrically explosive
adaptation and translation is to imagine the special relationship between playwright,
Anton Chekov and the Moscow Arts Theatre’s Konstantin Stanislavski. From the opening birthday preparation with
coloured balloons, inflated by Olga at the gas cylinder, to the revelry of the
New Year’s Eve celebrations and Masha’s obsessive dance and the image of the teacher,
circling the troubled Irina on a bicycle around an open stage, Williams
skilfully choreographs a changing stagescape of dreams and desires, of fateful
fortunes, shattered hopes and entrapped longings. This Sydney Theatre
Production of Chekov’s tragi-comedy must loom large as one of the funniest,
saddest, most disturbing and most profound productions that I have seen. Every
moment is carefully and sensitively portrayed as a lesson in Life.
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| Miranda Daughtry, Anthony Brandon Wong and Alison Bell STC's Three Sisters. Photo; Brett Boardman |
Chekov’s
characters assume iconic status. We have seen many of them in other plays by
the country doctor with a keen eye for the human condition. Williams has cast
his production with appreciation of the circumstances that place each character in
the same situation and yet makes each uniquely different in character. Masha (Eryn Jean Norvill), Irina (Miranda
Daughtry) and Olga (Alison Bell) live with their brother Andrei (Brandon
McClelland), a councillor, and his domineering wife, Natasha (Nikki Shiels) in
the parental home. Their world is predictable, determined by tradition and
expectation. It is a world that suffocates, stifles, and conforms. Each
character is torn apart by desire, thwarted by circumstance and tormented by
Life’s unerring confinement. Olga struggles to preserve the memory of her
father, now deceased a year, and uphold his legacy. Masha, trapped in a her
marriage to the teacher Kulygin (Chris Ryan), longs for the unrestrained,
passionate love of her colonel, Vershinin (Mark Leonard Winter ), a married man
with two daughters. Irina longs to escape the barren existence of her life and
work as a post office clerk and escape to her home, to Moscow. She rejects the
admission of love by Tusenbach (Harry Greenwood), only to be bereft of hope and
resigned to live out her days without love.
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| Chris Ryan, Mark Leonard Winter and Eryn Jean Norvell in STC's Three Sisters. Photo Brett Boardman |
Stanislavski’s
search for truth and Chekov’s affectionate portrayal of the flawed inhabitants
of his town and time lie at the very core of this production. Williams and
Upton have not constructed an authentic portrait of Tsarist Russia. And yet, we
can imagine ourselves to be witnessing Chekov’s characters in their time as
easily as we can suppose the characters to be living out the attitudes and
emotion of our age. Director and writer have identified the burning motivation
of Chekov’s characters. A stellar cast is flung with all the desires, fears and
frustrations of readily recognizable characters, headlong into the twenty first
century against the backdrop of Chekov’s story of people trapped within the
troubled years of pre-revolutionary Russia. Anachronism does not defy truth. It
illuminates the universal humanity of all peoples and all ages and speaks with
force and truth to the audiences of our time. If you search for the realism of
Chekov’s age, you may be disappointed. Do not be concerned by Olga and Masha,
dressed in jeans or the expletives erupting from Masha’s mouth in torrents of
frustration. If you look for the true
nature of humanity, a universal truth will be revealed in a production that is
honest, powerful and revealing.
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| Harry Greenwood and Mark Leonard Winter in STC's Three Sisters. Photo: Brett Boardman |
I am struck by
the Sydney Theatre Company production, not because I am exposed to Chekov’s
world, although that is implicit within the action and words of the characters,
but because I see all humanity revealed through the lives and longings of the
three sisters, the jealousies and rages of the frustrated, the failings of the
vulnerable and the weak, the injustices of class, the violence within the heart
and minds of the human condition and the transient passage of all people’s fleeting
mortality. Such is the mirror held up to Nature in Williams’s production of Three Sisters. We laugh. We cry. We dream. We die. It is this
lesson in Life that makes this production of Three Sisters compelling and must see theatre.
