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by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Susan Coyne,

directed by Martha Henry

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 3-October 3, 2009

"Hope Crushed"

The Stratford Festival’s latest production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” is a shattering experience.  Director Martha Henry draws excellent performances from nearly the entire cast and although not all aspects of the staging are successful so much of it is, and powerfully so, that the play’s cumulative effect is overwhelming.

Chekhov’s 1901 play is a portrait of the Prozorov family over the period of four years. The three sisters of the title--Olga, Masha and Irina--grew up in Moscow but for the past eleven years have felt exiled in a small cultureless provincial town where the only society is provided by the army garrisoned there.  The three revel in their memories of the past life in the city and of the time when their parents were alive.  At the start of the play they are filled with hope that their brother Andrei will sell their parents’ house and they can all move back to Moscow.  This hope is quickly undermined when Andrei marries a local girl, Natasha, and when Masha and Irina find themselves entangled in love affairs with the army officers.  The sisters‘ predicament reflects that of all the characters who must cope with a life bereft of hope or meaning where only the most religious or the most callous people seem to thrive.

Of the Prozorov siblings the the most gripping performance comes from Lucy Peacock as Masha.  Married young to the dull schoolmaster Kulygin, she is slowly suffocating in a pointless, loveless life until she meets the dashing but married Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin.  Peacock’s detailing of the slow growth of this passion and its sudden end is among the best work she has ever done.  Her animalistic howling at her forced separation from Vershinin at the end is heart-rending.  Equally fine is Irene Poole as Masha’s foil Olga.  She shows us a woman always forced to be sensible because those around her are not, always forced to act for the benefit of other and never for herself.  In a beautifully restrained performance Poole shows us how Olga’s life of self-abnegation and doing the right thing has nearly crushed all hope in her for a fuller life.  She throws herself into her work as a schoolteacher to anaesthetize the pain.

As Irina, Dalal Badr certainly looks and sounds like the youngest of the three, but soon we find very little variation in her line delivery and worse, especially in Chekhov, little ability to say one thing and communicate another.  This is particularly noticeable at the very end when her Irina almost immediately recovers from the death of her lover and is unable to carry the grief she should feel into her following speeches.  The same is true of Gordon S. Miller as Andrei.  Andrei is a weak character but it requires a strong actor to bring out the interior suffering of such a person.  This Miller does not do.  We should see long before his candid outburst to the doctor in Act 4, that Andrei’s sense of self-worth is crumbling away to nothing.

Kelli Fox’s portrayal of Andrei’s wife, Natasha, who hides her nastiness, pettiness, egotism and hypocrisy beneath smiles and feigned concern, is painfully true to life.  Her masterful acting creates such a powerful portrait of officiousness verging on evil that you almost don’t want to sanction it with applause.

Tom McCamus is in top form as Vershinin.  He conveys all too clearly that his character’s belief in the perfectibility of mankind and in a future without strife is so strong because his present life is so bleak.  McCamus and Peacock do make it seem fated that these two will fall in love, knowing but trying to forget that their romance can have no happy ending.  Sean Arbuckle gives an exquisite performance as Baron Tuzenbach, who falls hopelessly in love with Irina, knowing she does not love him.  Arbuckle managed to portray exactly the natural goodness and kindness of character that all the others praise him for.  He makes the underlying despair in Tuzenbach’s final farewell from Irina, from whom he seeks only one word of approbation, so tangible it is the most devastating scene in the play.

In smaller roles, James Blendick clearly revels in the chance to play someone who is not a respected authority figure.  His Doctor Chebutykin has the darkest, most cynical world view in the play, a view he embraces because he so acutely aware of how he has wasted his life.  His self-laceration for allowing a woman to die is as painful to watch as is his proclamations that nothing matters in response to the play’s most wrenching moments.  Peter is excellent as Masha’s pedantic husband Kulygin, so in love with Masha he will forgive her anything and painfully aware he can do nothing to please her. Juan Chioran’s Solyony gives the impression that he is so perpetually wound up that the slightest thing will set off a bizarre reaction.  Joyce Campion, as one might expect, makes a loveable Anfisa, the aged nurse to the four Prozorovs, and it cuts us as it does Olga to see Natasha mistreat her.

The production is beautifully lit by Leigh Ann Vardy, who recreates the golden glow of candlelit rooms.  John Pennoyer’s set design spreads the Prozorov abode over the entire Tom Patterson stage for the play’s  first half.  His design for the second half is less successful.  For the fire scene of Chekhov’s Act 3, all the action is cramped into the  upstage third of the stage.  Those not sitting head on will likely get a crick in their necks from having to turn sideways for so long.  Chekhov’s Act 4 requires a forest outside the house, here pitifully represented by three latticework felt trees that look like partially squashed Christmas tree-shaped pasta.  They’re so ugly it would have been better to do without them.  Pennoyer’s costumes capture both the period and the characters‘ natures, but his Act 4 costumes for the travelling musicians are simply tacky.

Susan Coyne’s adaptation makes Chekhov sound very modern, perhaps too modern, and Martha Henry’s direction sometime allows actors gestures that are too contemporary and she tries too hard to make the affirmations of the sisters at the close too upbeat. To go on after all they have experienced seems more like a necessary self-delusion.  Yet, overall, what she achieves is more important--the sense of an ineluctable doom beneath all the laughter, triviality and pettiness.  If you have ever felt that life has passed you by, this production will hit you very hard.  But at least you will know that you’re not the only one who has ever felt like this. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: James Blendick (background), Lucy Peacock, Irene Poole and Dalal Badr. ©David Hou.