...SISTERS. To 5 July.

London.

…SISTERS
by Chris Goode adapted from Anton Chekhov.

Gate Theatre To 5 July 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Audio-described 24 June.
Runs 1hr 25min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7229 0706.
www.gatetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 June.

Every night something different with Chekhov’s sisterly trio.
This co-production between the Gate and Headlong Theatre, both experimenters with other people’s plays for today’s audiences, needs testing on an audience of people who don’t know Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Would it seem to them more than a mix of mutterings and uncertainties, stuffed with miscues?

Everything here is in Chekhov (apart from the rabbit, reborn as a theatrical phenomenon from Beerbohm Tree’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream a century ago. And, though I saw just one rabbit frolicking in the final, garden-set act, I’m assured there are two in the cast).

Chris Goode has not simply done a cut-and-paste with Chekhov, as Charles Marowitz did with Shakespeare in the 1960s and 70s, reassigning lines between characters. Here, dialogue stays with its character. It’s the actors who change, seemingly spontaneously, adopting a hat or jacket (or fantastically luxuriant beard) as they shift between characters.

They seem, sometimes, to take each other by surprise, or spring to provide a character who’s needed to respond to another. At other times, the same lines seem deliberately played in counterpoint by two groups, sharpening the mundane conversations with which Chekhov cloaks his people’s deepest concerns.

Each night, we’re assured, things go differently. That must be true: how do you direct a rabbit?

The surprises can merely seem miscalculations. But they can lead to an edgy spontaneity that reinvents the play for an age of reality and improvisational performances. At best, the low-key responses (you don’t improvise a commanding performance among an ensemble) bring the world of these characters to life. At worst, they seem like theatre-games for the participants’ amusement.

Spontaneity applies to lighting and set. Naomi Dawson’s design has proportions that make it seem a private world as well as a stage, its multiple post-it notes suggesting immediacy. Yet some moments defiantly seem pre-determined: the slow-motion group expression of agonies at the third act’s conclusion, or the still, seated grouping as the sisters see the soldiers depart, marching away with the excitement they had brought the household.

Performers: Gemma Brockis, Catherine Dyson, Julia Innocenti, Helen Kirkpatrick, Tom Lyall, Melanie Wilson, a rabbit (or two).

Director: Chris Goode.
Designer: Naomi Dawson.
Lighting: Anna Watson.
Assistant director: Wendy Hubbard.
Assistant designer: Chimaine Sampson.
Assistant lighting: Jack Knowles.

2008-06-21 12:30:36