Three Sisters
Barbican Theatre
Silk Street, EC2Y 8BQ
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Declan Donnellan.
Cast: Andrei Kutzichev, Igor Yasulovich, Cheek By Jowl, Alexander Feklistov, Nelly Uvarova
Description:
Russian ensemble Cheek By Jowl presents Chekhov's classic love story, about three sisters whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of an officer. In Russian with English surtitles.
Times:
May 15, 7pm, May 16-19, 7.15pm, mat May 19, 2.30pm
Price:
£25
Trains:
Tube/BR: Barbican/Moorgate
Phone:
0845120 7550
Website:
www.barbican.org.uk
Trapped in a cul-de-sac
By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard
16.05.07
Poignant: Irina (Nelli Uvarova), Masha (Irina Grineva) and Olga (Evgenia Dmitrieva) touchingly register the sisters' increasing unhappiness
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I cannot agree with the golden critical opinions that Declan Donnellan's production of Three Sisters has earned while on tour. Two great productions of the play - by Laurence Olivier and Trevor Nunn - are lodged in my mind.
Donnellan lacks Olivier's ability to capture the peculiar vibrancy and emotional volatilty of Chekhov's characters. He never matches the insistent pathos of Nunn's reading. He does, though, offer the rare opportunity to hear Chekhov spoken in the original by spirited, confident and engaging Russians, with surtitles in prominent view.
Something, though, goes missing. Directors have to make crucial decisions. Is the play a tragedy of landed gentry in grievous, grieving decline, high hopes dashed? Is it an optimistic drama, in which the sisters, inspired by Colonel Vershinin, put their stoic faith in a future Russia transformed by education and knowledge? Or is it something of both? This romanticised, undefined production simply lets the play drift into a bitter-sweet, melancholic cul-de-sac.
Nick Ormerod, Donnellan's constant designer, sets the scene with his brand of abstract, symbolic minimalism. He pictures the sisters' home as bare, desolate limbo-land, with a symbolic doll's house in view. Two redundant, blown-up, billboard photographs of a house's facade stand amidst scattered chairs and small tables, rearranged to mark shifts of scene. An ancient gramophone and soldiers with guitars suitably intensify the elegiac mood.
Alexander Feklistov, too mature as the fortyish Vershinin, never sounds or looks a catalyst for change. Nor does he project intellectual and erotic power in this languid, candlelit household.
Ekaterina Sibiryakova strikes few villainous formidable notes as the vulgar arriviste who takes the sisters' brother, Andrey, in hand, binds him to her in a miserable marriage and gradually fixes the sisters and the house itself in her controlling grasp.
Donnellan well conveys the sense of gloomy repression and compression that attends Natasha's ascendancy, while Kulygin, Masha's unloved husband, ranges from grotesquery to misery.
The sisters, Nelly Uvarova's despairingly bemused Irina who makes do with Tuzenbach, Evgenia Dmitrieva's attractive, buoyant Olga and Irina Grineva's Masha smitten by love for Vershinin are first poignantly seen standing with Alexei Dadonov's bland Andrey, as if posed for a photograph. They touchingly register the young women's accelerating unhappiness and detachment from their brother. Yet neither they nor the production rise to that pitch of intensity Three Sisters can achieve.
?
Until 19 May (0845 120 7550).
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