Three Sisters
Gaiety Theatre
★★★★☆
“It’s possible our lives will be looked back on as boring,” someone says early in Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s sharpened new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play from 1901.
It’s a prediction that has been tweaked over the years. Since Julius West’s door-opening English-language translation, all that’s “serious, significant, very important” to Chekhov’s fading aristocratic family and their friends in a military town has been speculated to someday seem “trivial” or “forgotten”.
In Sugarglass and Once Off’s production, history’s insult sounds personal. Their entire lives will appear boring.
It makes sense that Smyth, the writer of the darkly screwy farces Lie Low and We Can’t Have Monkeys in the House, would shift Chekhov’s play towards the absurd situations of surreal comedy. From the play’s table-setting opening line by Olga, the eldest sister (wonderfully on edge in Breffni Holahan’s performance), the delivery can be funnily oblique: “It’s one year since Daddy died. Look at us: we can talk about it!”
Three Sisters at Dublin Theatre Festival: Saoirse-Monica Jackson gives a sharp turn in a fresh take on Chekhov
Caligula, at Dublin Theatre Festival, resonates as a meditation on tyranny and resistance
My Right Foot, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is a masterclass in humour, honesty and resilience
Dublin Jack, at Dublin Theatre Festival, looks behind sexual scandal to expose hypocrisy
At a party at their house, where guests come and go in modern-day boxy leathers and ankle-grazer jeans, Olga and her sisters vaguely commit to relocate to Moscow. Distractions get in the way. Irina (Máiréad Tyers, giving a coolheaded picture of young hope) is more excited by entering a meaningful workforce – “I want to work. Work is purpose” – than an admiring deputy (nicely played by Darragh Feehely). The unhappily married Masha (wonderfully indifferent in Megan Cusack’s performance) becomes electrified by the surprise arrival of a philosophy-obsessed lieutenant (Fionn Ó Loingsigh).
“It’s like an open-door policy in here!” their jittery sister-in-law Natasha jokes nervously. There is an intriguing shiver of anxiety through Saoirse-Monica Jackson’s sharp performance, as if Natasha’s position within the household – unwanted by the sisters, yearning to seize the house to start her own family – is driving her insane.
Marc Atkinson Borrull’s staging doesn’t linger on the play’s missed connections or stings of rejection. This fleet and fresh production will sooner present side by side two marriages in a spiral, the sight of Cusack’s unsatisfied Masha partying near uncontrollably on top of a table while Jackson’s embittering Natasha orbits with a candle, trying to put a baby to bed amid the noise.
Some are more successful at making Chekhov’s nonsense ping than others. Cameron Tharmaratnam’s windy, backtracking delivery as Masha’s husband is outstanding – “Irina’s like Masha...! Only, Irina’s character is gentler. Though Masha’s character, too, is a very good one. I’m very fond of Masha.”
This isn’t quite Chekhov as full-on, trippy surreal comedy. But Smyth’s adjustments are touching, sending Irina into an impulsive kiss with an admirer and allowing Alex Murphy to give an encouraging moment of self-reflection as the sisters’ soured brother.
Smyth prefers Masha above all; interrupting the men’s debate about philosophy, she says: “Life needs meaning.” But Smyth attaches a new line, as if Masha were tantalisingly near everything she needs: “Happiness feels so close to me right now.”
Runs at the Gaiety, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 12th
