The Stage

…Sisters

Published Friday 13 June 2008 at 11:25 by Jason Best

Anton Chekhov’s enduring masterpiece about three sisters trapped in a provincial backwater has proved remarkably resilient in recent years. It has withstood being uprooted to settings as removed from Russia as Trinidad and Liverpool, and it has survived productions that play up the comedy and others that emphasise the melancholy.

The latest interpretative assault on the play, however, is much more radical. Chris Goode’s new staging, winner of the first Gate/Headlong New Directions Award championing experimental approaches to classic plays, takes the text apart from within, deconstructing the drama and then reassembling it in the hands of six actors who improvise a different version of the story each night.

Goode’s cast don’t quite make it all up as they go along - the staging broadly follows Chekhov’s four acts. But within this framework, almost anything goes. The actors - five women, one man - draw lots to determine who, irrespective of gender, plays which role, but this changes moment by moment as the company swap parts, double the same character, even speak the same lines. So Olga’s glasses and Masha’s straw hat go back and forth, as does Kulygin’s comically bushy moustache, while the green sash of pushy interloper Natasha appears simultaneously on two different people.

Within this chaos, the production occasionally throws up quirkily amusing details, such as two soldiers playing ping pong with ridiculously tiny bats, that seem perverse but do convey something authentically Chekhovian - the grinding boredom of provincial life - yet the staging never really yields any fresh insight into the play. The constant element of randomness does keep the audience, as much as the actors, on their toes, but if you don’t know the narrative already you will probably be as bewildered as the pair of rabbits bizarrely let loose on stage in the final act.