Three Sisters (National)

Chekhov seems to be travelling in pairs nowadays. No sooner have not one but two Seagulls flown in to Chichester and the Edinburgh Festival just days apart from each other (See News, 11 Aug 2003), than the same August week has also brought London its second set of Three Sisters of the year.

Seeing the Edinburgh production of The Seagull and the National’s new Three Sisters on consecutive nights, however, is to find oneself overwhelmed not only by the Chekhovian gloom that inevitably envelops both plays, but also by the intensity of feeling amidst the languor. To see one great Chekhov production a year is a rare treat; to see two in a row is a feast. So I have now supped full and intensely on languid misery and crushed hopes.

Both Peter Stein in Edinburgh and Katie Mitchell in this London Three Sisters take their time. These productions aren’t for theatregoers in a hurry, since each clock in at nearly three and a half hours. But it’s time well spent. And while both directors have examined and excavated the texts minutely with their actors to make every moment register, they’ve also made us work, too: their productions are frequently played in a sepulchral darkness that means you could just as well be listening to the plays on the radio at points.

But if there’s a lack of lighting, there’s no lack of illumination in the directors’ profound vision of Chekhov’s plays. There’s texture and tension, rigour and rhythm to the work that makes it totally inhabited rather than inhibited. Working with ad hoc ensembles that have been assembled from some of our country’s best actors, they actually feel like the families and long-time associates they are supposed to be.

Mitchell’s hallmark as a director has always been an intense naturalism, but here in Three Sisters she also employs poetic metaphors of movement (where the characters will suddenly go into momentary slow motion), sound (there’s a subtle underscoring of sound throughout) and photography (in images that are projected onto a screen between scenes and only slowly come in to focus).

Michael Blakemore’s West End staging of this play earlier this year may have had the glamour of screen star Kristen Scott Thomas, but this production has true grit. As the perpetually mourning Masha, the wonderful Eve Best continues to live up to her name as one of the stage’s most exciting young actresses. She’s beautifully complemented, too, by the longings of her sisters, with Lorraine Ashbourne as Olga and Anna Maxwell Martin as a clinically depressed Irina.

There’s also tremendous support from the men who circle warily and sometimes wearily around them: Dominic Rowan as their weak brother, married to a strong woman; Angus Wright as Masha’s unloved husband Kulygin; and Ben Daniels as the philosophising Vershinin.

But while all the company shed new light on the play, my only regret is that one couldn’t necessarily always see as much thanks to the overwhelming darkness into which the stage is too often plunged.

– Mark Shenton