THREE SISTERS. To 2 September.

Edinburgh

THREE SISTERS
by Anton Chekhov translated by Paul Schmidt

King’s Theatre To 2 September 2006
Runs 3hr 40min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 August

Chekhov with raw nerves showing.
Despite controversial material elsewhere at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, it’s the American Repertory Theatre’s Chekhov that’s seen the walkouts. For Krystian Lupa’s Three Sisters confounds expectations.

The usually sensitive Prozorov girls here become condescending, foul-mouthed and unpleasant. Far from intellectual lights in small-town Russia, they waste their lives in unsatisfactory work or marriage, and do nothing about it.

It’s despised Natasha, at whom they cruelly laugh, and who marries the Prozorov’s go-nowhere brother Andrey, (all ambition and violin-playing, fiddling while his life smoulders to ashes), who organises, thinks of her children’s well-being and gets things done. If Lupa de-romanticises the Prozorov women, he does his best for Natasha. When she lambasts the family Nurse, Natasha really doesn’t understanding why Anfisa’s treated as she is; her last-act tables-turned fashion statement to Olga is subdued. It almost works.

Perhaps the King’s was unwise to claim this production puts “vigour” into the play. Though only 15 minutes long than Trevor Nunn’s celebrated 1970s production seventies, Lupa’s version stretches non-happening to breaking point. Only minor soldiers Fedotik and Rode match Natasha’s briskness. Occasionally credibility snaps, actors’ technique showing through their characters’ inaction.

New-arrival Vershinin is initially happy, but soon becomes acclimatised to the local stasis. His philosophising carries no hope. It’s all words carved out of silence, - a need to say something, expressing the dynamics of relationships rather than ideas. He and Tuzenbach, the army officer philosophers, are physical mirror-images, a further element of disassociation on a huge set where an upstage glass partition and upper balcony already create distance with the vocal modifications this brings.

And Tuzenbach reappears, bullet hole on his forehead, after the fatal duel, as if this ever-thinking man could not accept his own death. It’s far from realism, yet reflects Chekhov’s substance in an unChekhovian way.

Riskier is omitting Irina’s second act longing for Moscow, replaced (typically enough) with blank silence. Inexcusable is the final cop-out, letting Olga’s voice rise optimistically over an army band. Even as irony, it’s removed from the rest of this tough, far from typical production, which anatomises the red-raw agony under the skin of Chekhov’s play.

Andrey Prozorov: Sean Dugan
Olga Prozorov: Kelly McAndrew
Masha Prozorov: Molly Ward
Irina Prozorov: Sarah Grace Wilson
Natasha: Julienne Hanzelka Kim
Kulygin: Will LeBow
Vershinin: Frank Wood
Barom Tuzenbach: Jeff Biehl
Solyony: Chris McKinney
Chebutykin: Thomas Derrah
Fedotik: Sean Simbro
Rode: Patrick Mapel
Ferapont: Jeremy Geidt
Anfisa: Mikki Lipsey
Soldiers: Freddy Franklin, Ryan West

Director/Designer: Krystian Lupa
Lighting: Scott Zielinski
Sound: David Remedios
Music: Jacek Ostaszewski
Costume: Piotr Skiba
Voice coach: Nancy Houfek
Dramaturgs: Gideon Lester, John Herndon
Assistant director: Marcin Wierzchowski

2006-09-05 16:47:10