Review by Simon Jenner, February 22nd 2025
The Wanamaker seems tailored for Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the exquisite silver-grey set suffused in candlelight and great sunken encounters. Rory Mullarkey’s Three Sisters directed at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker by Caroline Steinbeis till April 19th gleams with a new mineral prose, absorbs with pristine Chekhov. This production and actors relish it. This Chekhov though in Mullarkey’s hands breathes the first scent of the absurd.
It’s not often a contemporary adaptor of Chekhov can provide his own translation: no literal/adaptation trade-off in sight. Reading Russian at Cambridge, travelling in Russia, Russia’s seeped into Mullarkey’s original plays, Footlights twists on bloody revolutions. Mullarkey’s own mild absurdism (he references Beckett, though seems closer to Adamov) points that up; but it’s naturally refracted. As Mullarkey points out, Chekhov breathes with ellipses, with his prose not chopped up as so often recently.
But how to power those great loping paragraphs? Steinbeis and her team make this a slightly rattled “machine for empathy” in Chris Bush’s recent phrase. The production hums with a perhaps over-relentless purpose to begin with, to prove a point. Literally, with strange noises off. Echoes of the dead father’s military drilling cross-hatch with frantic delivery. Over two hours forty-five this purpose diffuses into gaunt sunlight.
Left to itself Olga’s opening monologue is formally stiff; in contrast to others Olga takes time to unbend. Michelle Terry’s seems galvanised like a mildly demented robot as she turbo-charges exposition, shocked into spouting. The hand of the general falls heaviest on her, running the house. Terry doesn’t leave it there though. Interacting she lets herself unbend, particularly to Nurse Anfisa. And to Natalya, more of whom later, she opposes resolute dignity: but it’s not enough in a new world.
Michelle Terry, Ruby Thompson, Shannon Tarbet, Photo Credit: Johan Persson
Shannon Tarbet’s black-clad Masha recalls that other Masha wearing in black in mourning for her life, in The Seagull; rather than the contained explosion of this Masha, who married at 18 another teacher, again the wrong man. Perhaps Olga might have been happier with hapless Fyodor. In contrast to Terry’s clipped control, Tarbet snarls and smoulders, makes sarky asides and talks in jump-starts. Later Tarbet semaphores desire in dark shadows and by the pitiless blaze of the last act complete abandon.
There’s meant to be joy in Irina, just 20 at the start. Ruby Thompson seems more muted in Irina’s joyfulness than normal, preppy, soured with premonitions. This is truthful: Irina’s already endured boredom and will know fear. At the end, telling her fiancé she doesn’t love him, witholding the gentleness that for instance Olga’s Terry shows her sisters and nurse; the joyfulness some Irinas contrast with their sisters.
Natalya (Natalie Klamar) gives perhaps the finest performance of all. Her Natalya seeks attention from the start flouncing out in furious embarrassment over her livid green sash over a cherry-red dress (she mutes it later) and never forgets or forgives, seeking vengeance. Klamar’s hideously energised power-grab, her OCD notice of a stray fork, her treatment of nurse Anfisa “don’t you dare sit in my presence” is in direct proportion as she colonises and sidelines Andrei, then his sisters from their own rooms, as she continues an affair she had brewing before Andrei. Slightly unhinged, she’s driven by power, the dark portent of class vengeance she could never articulate.
Ruby Thompson. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
It’s with Natalya that Mullarkey’s language jars with modernity too: “teeny little eyes” does for son Bobik, and most egregiously “the servants have completely lost the plot.” I’m assuming Chekhov hinted a different idiom.
Stuart Thompson’s Andrei is surprisingly youthful and glowing. References to him putting on weight fall flat – he’s anything but seedy – but his final appearance, bitterly aware he’s failed everyone, seems in his shorn hair a reparation for reckless gambling, perhaps brought on by his realisation of who Natalya is.
Paul Ready’s laughing colonel Vershinin – who talks about how wonderful life in the future will be – has terrific comic timing. Unlike Astrov in Uncle Vanya he’s a prophetic optimist: there is hope, but not for us, who make it possible. Like the end of George Eliot’s Middlemarch it can be devastating. Ready’s Vershinin dispatches his vision several times (these repeats are often cut), like a comforting mental tic; but his radiance captures Masha and their telegraphed exchanges quicken like filaments in the dark.
Solynov (Richard Pyros) is by contrast a superb disrupter, and Pyros enters the stage from wild angles, disturbing, discomfited. His reluctant antagonist Tuzenbach (Michael Abubakar) is more youthful than normal (Tuzenbach’s only 28 at the start), more appealing. Which makes his capacity to parry Solynov more precarious, love for Irina believably inexperienced.
Masha’s husband teacher Fyodor (Keir Charles) is here skewered tenderly. Charles misses nothing of his absurdity (his fake beard moment spooks Natalya) but brings a nobility in his preparedness to reach out to Masha after her affair. It’s difficult to see if Tarbet dismisses him or collapses with acceptance at this point.
Ruby Thompson. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
Like Klamar’s Natalya, there’s a gem too in Peter Wight’s doctor Chebutykin. Wight moves from pathetic failed suitor of the sisters’ mother decades ago, to the callous booze-relapsed blunderer, indifferent to “one baron more or less” though haunted by causing the death of a female patient last Wednesday.
Wight though is one reason why the slower but briefer Acts Three and Four gain solidity and weight, their career less headlong. Wight can carry “I’m killing time today” like a sudden lapse of time, and it eddies in his tuneless chant. Continually he proclaims his life “flies by…flashed by like lightning… loneliness is a terrifying thing” often counterpointed by his hopeless love, goaded by the equally disconsolate Solnyov and outburst when his gift (a samovar) is derided. The last of Chekhov’s three doctors, he’s least reconciled, most unappeased.
Oli Townsend’s set is a miracle. An ornamented silver-grey backdrop that glows pistachio in some light, counterpoints rustic wooden flooring; and an inspired use of a trap door with descending stairs so Act Three (of four) takes place in an upstairs communal bedroom. In another very different light, we’re in an orchard.
It chimes with Anna Watson’s marvellous candlelight design that crafts rooms and atmospheres, muscle memories of shadow and discovered declarations. Watson manages memorably haunting effects where differing combos point up a scene or leave it in limbo, like those spoken ellipses. As cast-members take these up it’s a virtuosic dance of ones and twos and works with the play. The contrast is more shocking as Act Four’s sudden daylight shows the house gone, tenebrous hopes banished.
Anfisa (Ishia Bennison) after a bruising from Natasha finds kindness and hope (perhaps ends happiest of all) at Olga’s instigation. The last time Bennison was at the Globe was in a discussion about Shakespeare, and the only regret is her part’s so small.
Cheery Fedotik (in Kelvin Ade’s ebullient puppy-like performance) is a role often cut. With Rachel Barnwell’s bustling servant he ensures the ensemble ricochets like a pin-ball machine.
Ruby Tarbot, Michelle Terry, Shannon Tarbet. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
Ruby Thompson, Michelle Terry. Photo Credit: Johan Persson
That’s apart from the piping groans – a mixture of Hogwarts’ plumbing and portent of that eerie twang in Chekhov’s next, last play, The Cherry Orchard. The houses themselves prophesy war.
That’s partly as Oliver Vibrans’ score invoking them veers to the future too. It’s a tonic here, usually cut in performance. Rob Millett leads with percussion and memorable cimbalom, tanged with the balalaikas others use. There’s Sarah Field’s off-stage military trumpet and clarinet, and as a procession of musicians Gabriela Opacka-Boccadoro wields violin (doubling as Andrei’s tuning-up Bach) and domra, with Maddie Cutter’s plangent cello.
There’s a rapt self-communing in this production of Three Sisters that almost neutralises the vinegar in this sourest of Chekhov’s four greatest dramas. A must-see, it glows long after you’ve left it, amplified from what now seems an ideal space. Of more modern dramatists visiting the Wanamaker, Chekhov might make the most welcome return.
Assistant Director Shiv Rabheru
Movement Director/Choreographer Aline David, Fight and Intimacy Director Haruka Kuroda
Co-Costume Designer and Costume Supervisor Megan Rarity, Globe Associate – Movement Glynn MacDonald, Head of Voice Tess Dignan
Head of Production Wills, Head of Stage Bryan Paterson, Head of Wigs, Hair and Make-up Gilly Church, Head of Wardrobe Emma Lucy-Hughes, Head of Company Management Marion Marrs, Head of Props Emma Hughes
Stage Manager Jenny Skivens, DCMs Kristy Bloxham, Carol Pestridge, DSM Jade Hunter, ASM Roma Radford, Camila Hoyos Stuttle, Casting Becky Paris CDG. Producer Ellie James
Michelle Terry, Ruby Thompson, Shannon Tarbet. Photo Credit: Johan Persson