Three Sisters review: Hugely enjoyable production underlines ongoing relevance of Chekov
Saoirse Monica Jackson in Three Sisters, at the Gaiety. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
As soon as Breffni Holahan’s Olga speaks her first lines, remembering it’s a year to the day since the three Prozorov sisters’ father died, you can see where director Marc Atkinson Borrull and writer Ciara Elizabeth Smyth are going in this new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s enduring classic.
Her pitch is almost too heightened, too absurd. The actor moderates it as she settles into a fine performance, but that tone remains in this stylish and sometimes zany production.
Olga is joined in this tight crucible of the family by her sisters Masha (a vibrant Megan Cusack) and Irina, given a more realist interpretation by Mairead Tyers.
There are the men too in this small-town big house: Masha’s well-meaning middlebrow bore of a husband, played with doltish zeal by Cameron Tharmaratnam. Natasha’s unloved beau Tuzenbach, a buzzing and delightfully deluded Darragh Feehely. Fionn O Loingsigh as the newly arrived Colonel Vershinin, destined to be Masha’s lover, is absurd even among all the absurdities in his apparent faith in the future (of all things!).
But then, each character has their own obsession, their own pose, their own vain attempt to find meaning. For Saoirse-Monica Jackson‘s Natasha it’s motherhood, if only she’d really believe in it. For her husband, the elder brother Andrei, it’s an obsession over his wasted talent. They are all almost like ghosts to each other, declaiming their dreams and regrets and memories, but listening and understanding little enough.
Atkinson Borrull and company conjure a vivid ensemble, without letting us forget they are all rather solipsistic, talking endlessly, compulsively, as though words might fill the void of existence. It’s a directorial tightrope act he pulls off well. It’s exasperating at times – exhausting, even. But that’s the point. Like the characters, we wait: for action, for direction. But like them, our expectations are misguided. And when events do come, they provide no meaning.
Lorcan Cranitch is wonderfully ragged as Doctor Chebutykin. When he drunkenly smashes a clock, he immediately wonders if he really did so, all action here being contingent and uncertain. There are shades of Beckett in the moment, as he muses that perhaps we don’t even exist – we merely seem to. A broken clock only tells the time right twice a day, but as a symbol for the fractured nature of reality, it’s always bang on.
Jackson, of fame, leans into her accent to underline her uneasy outsider status. But Smyth’s adaptation gives the text plenty of contemporary Irish flavour elsewhere too. The world remains Russian, but it feels close to home.
The staging is simple and evocative in Eugenia Genunchis design, with a raised platform, a table, and bentwood chairs; but those are embellished by some spectacular moments. For instance, when flames leap from the table as a prelude to the disastrous village fire in Act III. John Gunning’s lighting design is particularly worth noting – beautifully modulated to shifting moods and seasons, and simply stunning in the photography scenes.
But perhaps what remains most striking – still, always – is Chekhov’s modernity. We get these people. Their endless talking, their inertia, their desperate hopes to go to Moscow (or anywhere), their yearning for meaning, for love (never with the person they’re actually with) – it all lands in our era of strange freedoms and chronic insecurities. The old moral authorities may be gone, but they’re replaced by the more brutal, capricious authority of the free market.
We are spiritually adrift and materially constrained (hello, housing crisis, inflation, climate dread). Chekhov’s characters feel a similar anxiety, even from their sleepy provincial town. We see you, Prozorov sisters. We see you. And, as Olga has it, “We’ll go on living,” despite it all.
The Dublin Theatre Festival has been dense with adaptations this year. This one earns its place. Alive, fresh, and beautifully staged, it reminds us: when it comes to absurdity, decline, and existential despair, Chekhov is still your man. The only pity is the brevity of the run. Hopefully we'll see Three Sisters on tour.
