The bijou, candlelit stage at The Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse gives the feel of a doll’s house to this production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Dressed in puffy, floaty period costume and framed against exquisite wood panelling, the actors seem like they’ve been picked up and placed on the stage to read their lines rather than actually inhabiting Chekhov’s world.
Rory Mullarkey’s new translation foregrounds Three Sisters’ humour, interpreting it as bleak farce rather than outright tragedy. Everyone involved is hopelessly depressed, from the titular sisters who dream of escaping their suburban life, to the men who dream of marrying them, and the men who realise they are too old even to dream. They know things will end badly yet things still end up worse. Such is life in Russia.
The best roles go to Shannon Tarbet as middle sister Masha and Paul Ready (most recognisable from sitcom Motherland) as the lusty army officer Vershinin, who Masha sees as a better romantic bet than her preening schoolteacher husband. Their burgeoning affair is played as an absurdity, the result of bored self-interest rather than human connection. It’s fun, watching these unlikable people acting unpleasantly towards other unlikable people but it does start to get a little tired after the first 90 minutes.
Mullarkey’s tendency towards comedy also makes the play’s profound moments feel a little glib. Ruminations on the unattainability of fulfilment – “Happiness does not exist… Not yet, not for us” – come across as pure bluster. You never really connect with these characters, and therefore don’t really care what happens to them, whether that’s an unhappy marriage or a fatal gunshot wound.
There’s plenty to admire in this production: the lovely set, the live music played above the stage, the quality of acting throughout. The characters are forever lighting and extinguishing candles, which seems like a neat parallel for their listless existence, living out their days like Spotify playlists set to repeat, never growing, never learning.
But it’s not quite enough to get this three hour play over the line. “If only we knew what we’re suffering for,” laments one character. By the end, I was thinking the same thing.