Three Sisters at The Globe: Tragedy reimagined as farce – City AM

Thursday 13 February 2025 5:54 pm

The bijou, candlelit stage at The Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse provides the texture of a doll’s home to this manufacturing of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Wearing puffy, floaty interval costume and framed towards beautiful wooden panelling, the actors seem to be they’ve been picked up and positioned on the stage to learn their traces relatively than truly inhabiting Chekhov’s world.

Rory Mullarkey’s new translation foregrounds Three Sisters’ humour, decoding it as bleak farce relatively than outright tragedy. Everybody concerned is hopelessly depressed, from the titular sisters who dream of escaping their suburban life, to the lads who dream of marrying them, and the lads who realise they’re too previous even to dream. They know issues will finish badly but issues nonetheless find yourself worse. Such is life in Russia.

The most effective roles go to Shannon Tarbet as center sister Masha and Paul Prepared (most recognisable from sitcom Motherland) because the lusty military officer Vershinin, who Masha sees as a greater romantic guess than her preening schoolteacher husband. Their burgeoning affair is performed as an absurdity, the results of bored self-interest relatively than human connection. It’s enjoyable, watching these unlikable folks appearing unpleasantly in direction of different unlikable folks nevertheless it does begin to get just a little drained after the primary 90 minutes.

Mullarkey’s tendency in direction of comedy additionally makes the play’s profound moments really feel just a little glib. Ruminations on the unattainability of fulfilment – “Happiness doesn’t exist… Not but, not for us” – come throughout as pure bluster. You by no means actually join with these characters, and subsequently don’t actually care what occurs to them, whether or not that’s an sad marriage or a deadly gunshot wound.

There’s lots to admire on this manufacturing: the beautiful set, the reside music performed above the stage, the standard of appearing all through. The characters are ceaselessly lighting and extinguishing candles, which looks as if a neat parallel for his or her listless existence, residing out their days like Spotify playlists set to repeat, by no means rising, by no means studying.

However it’s not fairly sufficient to get this three hour play over the road. “If solely we knew what we’re struggling for,” laments one character. By the top, I used to be considering the identical factor.