Three Sisters at The Almeida

I have no problem with classic plays being modernised, but they have to remain true to the original.  Unfortunately, this is not the case with Cordelia Lynn’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, currently playing at The Almedia, despite her insistence that this is her aim.  Directed by Rebecca Frecknall and designed by Hildegard Bechtler, I was as desperate for the play to finish as the three sisters are to go to Moscow.

In theory, the play promises much, seeing as how the young director is reunited with Patsy Ferran following their stand out success at this theatre with Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke.  In practice I’m afraid it fails to engage and even the expressive moments aren’t enough to compensate for the fact that this particular Three Sisters is very dull indeed.  The stark set containing several chairs, a piano, a ledge on which is perched the sulky older brother, Andrey (Freddie Meredith) and not much else doesn’t help.  Thank goodness there is a vase of flowers to lighten the mood a little. The yearning for a better life, a common theme of Chekhov’s plays, can be a touch dreary, but it doesn’t have to be.  If one feels empathy with his characters and their surroundings aren’t all doom and gloom, this great exponent of “theatre of mood” shows what a wonderful ability he has to highlight a submerged life in the text.

The story concerns the sisters of the title; Olga (Patsy Ferran) the eldest, is a schoolteacher, fussing like a mother hen over her two sisters, the unhappily married Masha (a very sulky Pearl Chanda) and Irina (a fidgety Ria Zmitrowicz).  Love interest is provided by Vershinin (the usually excellent Peter McDonald) who alights in Masha a passion that her husband, Fyodo (Elliot Levoy) has never managed.  The three girls are all bored and frustrated by their lives in a provincial Russian town, but because this adaptation is imbedded neither in Russia’s past nor present but somewhere in-between, there is no sense of their isolation.  Also, the presence of paperback books and a transistor radio diminishes the hopelessness of their situation.  If these items are readily available, couldn’t the sisters just book a taxi out of there?

There are some light moments when the cast break into song and dance around in a jig, and the arrival of Vershinin and the soldiers bring some joy. However, the usual foreboding that Russia is on the cusp of a revolution following Tuzenbach’s speech about “a great storm coming” is as lost as the hint of any military glamour from these soldiers.

Elliot Levoy is excellent as Fyodo and his moments on stage lift the production.  Also I can quite see why Patsy Ferran won the Olivier Award for Best Actress in Summer and Smoke as her nuanced, if underused performance means Olga is a totally believable dutiful elder sister.

It’s just a pity that this time, Three Sisters doesn’t deliver the usual Chekhovian experience.