Review: Three Sisters, York Settlement Players, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until March 20 (From York Press)

Review: Three Sisters, York Settlement Players, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until March 20

9:53am Monday 15th March 2010 in

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HELEN Wilson liked nothing better in her Bristol student days than to tuck up with Anton Chekhov in her bed, flicking through the pages of another of his plays.

And now she has consummated her love affair at last, directing one of his prescient Russian dramas for the first time for the Settlement Players.

She felt particularly drawn to the female-focused Three Sisters, a typical Chekhov tale of a temporary community facing its final curtain, hoping as ever that things might improve but knowing deep down that they never will…although that must never stop the hope.

When first staged in Britain, Chekhov’s plays were all doom and gloom, and that reputation has stuck, unfairly so, but Michael Frayn’s adaptation restores the balance between flinty comedy and stifling suffering in Three Sisters. He even throws in a bad joke or two, none better/worse than the rhyming distinction between men pursuing philosophy and women being “full of gossipy”.

We join the not-so-merry throng on what should be the happiest of days, the birthday of the youngest of the three sisters, Irina (German actress Virginia Hartmann). However, Irina and bored, bored, bored, married sister Masha (Gemma Sharp) and wan, enervated elder spinster sister Olga (Rebecca Lowman), the reluctant local headmistress, are locked and lost in a small military town, their lives drifting over the horizon when they crave only to go to Moscow.

Naturally, they end up ultimately no more successful than Napoleon or Hitler, but here Moscow is as much metaphorical as physical.

Around them are the kind of feckless men that Alan Ayckbourn later made his trademark, and the first half is where the humour is to be found, especially in Andy Crisp’s desperately earnest, rhino-skinned Kulygin (Masha’s dull husband), Daniel Wilmot’s baron, Tusenbach (a latterday Sir Andrew Ague-cheek), and Jacob Smith’s turn as wind-up merchant Solyony.

Unful-filled hopes blight the men as well as the sisters, be it their underachieving, embittered brother Andrey (Ben Sawyer); or the work-shy baron; or Robin Sanger’s defeated doctor, Chebutykin; or the commander Vershinin (Maurice Crichton), who pontificates forlornly on his wish for a beautiful life as he conducts a doomed affair with Masha.

Wilson’s three-hour production is at its best in the third act, after a devastating fire takes its toll on already slender hopes. You can see the spirit withering in Lowman, Hartmann and Sharp’s increasingly frustrated sisters, while Christina Nobbs’s pushy, vulgar Natasha, Andrey’s new wife, comes to the fore, her materialist satisfaction at odds with the sister’s higher aspirations.

For all the clever use of friezes, the Studio stage is a little cramped, but then that suits a play where the house is never big enough for everyone passing through it.

Our reward for all the suffering is a blistering Three Sisters, topped off by Ruth Ford’s fretful West Country nanny Anfisa, a gem of a cameo.

Three Sisters, York Settlement Players, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until March 20.

Box office: 01904 623568.