ANOTHER THREE SISTERS. To 31 July.
Tour
ANOTHER THREE SISTERS
by Ivan Cutting adapted from Anton Chekhov
Eastern Angles Theatre Company Tour to 31 July 2004
7.30pm Mat Sat 3.45pm
Runs 2hr 45min One interval
TICKETS: 01473 211498 (10am-2pm)
www.easternangles.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 July
80 years on and those girls have still got nowhere. But what a journey.It's risky, rewriting Chekhov's A-list drama. But Eastern Angles director Ivan Cutting successfully forwards the Prozorov (now Prowse) sisters to East Anglia circa Margaret Thatcher's 1979 election victory. Three sixties children (look at the old clothes post-student Irina packs away) watch dismayed as the Conservative win's broadcast on TV. Only despised local sister-in-law Natalie, mean, thin-voiced and sharp-mannered, walks happily up to the screen, as if to embrace the new age.
But what do the cultured trio achieve? Natalie works towards a future while the nice girls dream and talk. Both contrast Another reference in this Three Sisters. It opened in the Suffolk town of Leiston, home to the Garrett factory, the major local employer till the eighties shake-out (indicated as the drama momentarily veers towards simplified politics with local labourer Solly carrying an anti-closure placard before abandoning rock n' roll and leather jacket for the neat haircut he'll need to find a job).
Back in the 19th century the Garrett family produced their own remarkable sister trio, a pioneer woman doctor, an architect and a leading suffragette. Now, oldest sister Anna merely carries books on the suffragettes to teach women's groups (references too to nearby Summerhill, the free-form school so antipathetic to Natalie and her ways).
Location, location, location makes the major point (no wonder Natalie's lover is an estate agent). Chekhov's play opened at the Moscow Art Theatre, for whose audiences the sisters' small-town life was remote. By touring rural barns, this show places itself with the sisters. Audiences may drive in from nearby towns, but they identify more with the locality than with London.
Near Leiston stand the Sizewell nuclear power stations. Marsha's army lover in Chekhov neatly becomes a nuclear-power scientist. All the men let women down at the stunning end they take up the old doctor's (one of several culled characters) fatalistic song as the sisters, who have been metaphorically staring at their futures throughout, sit alone, with longing glances through the window. Till they're joined, like a malign virus, by the sister-in-law who has been disrupting and reorganising them all along.
There's some awkwardness in the male performances though not John Adam's easy, conciliatory and, it emerges, ultimately weak Alexander. The women are excellent Nicola Connell unwavering in Natalie's narrow persistence, Agnes Hutton's Anna self-effacing in hard-working, ineffectual commitment, Charlotte Parry a fine picture of hope bathing in ever-deeper resignation. And Catherine Gill's outstanding Marsha - passionate but not idealised - clearly delineates moments of hope, exhilaration and frustration; her scenes with Adam bring an emotional warmth that's the only answer to Natalie and her 1980s.
Rosie Alabaster places the action on a raised stage between two banks of audience, the French Window looking out to open space a fitting picture of domestic life never quite seizing the world beyond.
Anna: Agnes Hutton
Andrew: Sean Cannon
Marsha: Catherine Gill
Irena: Charlotte Parry
Nicholas Toucon-Baker: Dylan Willey
Solomon Solly' Edwards: James Peck
Vivian Alexander: John Dane
Natalie: Nicola Connell
Director: Ivan Cutting
Designer: Rosie Alabaster
Lighting: Steve Cooney
Sound: Brian Hoyer
2004-07-24 12:29:54