Three Sisters (1990)
Independent on
Sunday, 1st April 1990, Irving Wardle
‘I’ve known you since you were born,’ the old doctor tells Irina in the first act of “Three Sisters”. Later on, Masha tackles him about this again: ‘My mother – did you love her?’ Chekhov leaves you to guess whether or not he is Irina’s father; but the question is settled in Adrian Noble’s production, where the doctor is played by Cyril Cusack and the sisters by his three daughters, Sorcha, Sinead and Niamh.
As you might expect, the stage glows with family
warmth and the gestures of long familiarity. At first sight, the girls are
huddled on a sofa, all sharing the same cheroot. Irina stops Masha whispering
by clapping a hand over her mouth. At the arrival of Vershinin, they turn into
giggling teenagers, clustering around, bombarding him with mischievous
questions; then they drag on the reluctant brother Andrei (Mark Lambert) and
regress right back to childhood as they tease and tickle the squirmingly
embarrassed boy, who stands there clutching his violin like a teddy bear, while
Cusack senior looks in misty-eyed, waiting to present the samovar to his
favourite girl.
Between that moment and the final tableau, where
the sisters melt into each other as an icon of endurance, the play takes them
on separate journeys that reveal their dissimilarities as much as their
emotional ties. And it happens that the three Cusacks present strongly
contrasted physical types corresponding to the Chekhov trio: Sorcha, a
strong-jawed capable figure who also transmits Olga’s incurable exhaustion;
Sinead, the classic beauty with equal resources for Masha’s lyrical passion and
savage tantrums; and Niamh, whose nymph-like detachment carries her through
from Irina’s name day to her bereavement.
They all have wonderful moments: but in terms of
long-range development it is Irina’s show, as hope gradually drains away and
the radiantly trusting girl shrivels into a bespectacled governess-like figure
with scraped-back hair, whose compulsive smile now transmits only loss and
panic.
The new text is by Frank McGuinness, whose most
visible contribution is to sharpen up the dialogue beyond the call of duty (it
is not in character for the doctor to say that Natasha is ‘ having it away with
Protopopov’).
Noble’s production also has some jarring elements;
such as the extra-textual appearance of a brattish Bobik, further to
incriminate Orla Brady’s vixenish Natasha.
Otherwise, a couple of under-cast performances
aside, this is a searchingly beautiful production; with a superb, many-sided Vershinin
from Michael Pennington; analogue staging by Bob Crowley; and impeccably
sensitive scenic orchestration, from the bold use of direct to the most
elaborate atmospheric control, as in the party scene where Fedotik’s guitar
gradually draws the card-players and talkers on to the floor, and the sisters
are locked in a dance with their old nurse (Anna Manahan) until, at a word from
Natasha, the warmth turns to ice.
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