Ralph Lindheim

“Heck of a fire, eh?”:
Three Sisters, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario

Review

Any production of a play by Anton Chekhov, even though his plays are produced in the English-speaking world more often than any playwright other than Shakespeare, is a cause for celebration. But this play, the first he wrote for the Moscow Art Theatre and tailored for their ensemble of talented actors — so many of them, in fact, that Chekhov created ten major roles as well as two important secondary parts — has remained especially vibrant not just because it demands that the large cast display its powers but also because it explores psychological, social, and metaphysical issues and questions that have moved and troubled audiences for over a century. It is not, of course, an easy play to mount and offers a series of challenges even to a sensitive translator, a gifted set of actors, and a smart director. And the current production of the play, running at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, through the beginning of August of this year, reveals many of the play's delights, while at the same time exposing a number of difficulties that have not been hurdled successfully.

The English version of the play prepared by Susan Coyne on the basis of a literal translation provided by Yana Meerzon and Dimitrii Priven is a smooth modern adaptation, the language of which sits easily on the ear of a contemporary audience. The occasional lyrical flights of the characters, expressing in fairly simple language their urgent poetic yearnings and aspirations — for Moscow and all it symbolically represents, for a true, deep love, for satisfactory and significant work, for a life that stimulates rather than strangles — Chekhov tellingly alternates with passages of the most prosaic banter. The heightened pitch of the lyric moments, therefore, must be palpable. But in the Shaw production the actors and their director seemed to rush through many of these passages rather than slowing the pace and performing them as if they were miniature arias. Coyne, however, can be faulted for some colloquialisms, so glaringly out of place coming from figures dressed in costumes from an era a hundred years ago. Solënyi, for example, explains in the second act that “When I'm just talking one on one, I'm fine…” and in the third act Andrei, anxious to strike up a friendly conversation with his sister Ol'ga, offers in an all too stereotypically Canadian manner and intonation, “Heck of a fire, eh?”

The actors all have their fine moments, though it is disconcerting that the sisters are not adequately differentiated, one from the other. At the very beginning of the play they dominate the stage, and the audience focuses on them before a word is spoken; each has her own place on the stage, each wears a dress of a different colour, each is doing something different. Though, as we will come to learn in the first act, they have much in common, sharing the same culture that will come under attack and the same values and prejudices of an elite military caste, which Chekhov will view favorably at times and dubiously at other times, the women must be rigorously distinguished one from the other. In this production, however, only the oldest of the sisters, the maternal Ol'ga (played by Kelli Fox), is clearly defined throughout the play, though she might have made more in the third act of her exhaustion and exasperation at being, once again, the only one of the sisters to see that the family's duties and obligations are met. But the other two sisters, the childlike Irina (Caroline Cave) and the unruly Masha (Tara Rosling), seem too similar in the way they speak and especially in the way they utter their despair. And in this play, which can be heard as a play for voices, the female as well as the male voices should sound differently and yet on occasion blend to produce a powerful harmony. The more vulgar and unrestrained Natasha (Fiona Byrne) contrasts nicely with her cultured in-laws, though at times her heavy, clumsy gait brings too vividly to mind the awkward country mouse figure often met in popular farces.

On the whole, the men are better than the women, except for Vershinin (Kevin Bundy) who tends to rush his lines even when, during his final appearance, he should find it difficult to philosophize. Chebutykin (David Schurmann) and Kulygin (Douglas E. Hughes) have nice moments in the first and last acts, and Andrei (Ben Carlson) is stronger in the middle acts. Tuzenbach (Jeff Meadows) is outstanding, delivering his lines in a way that illuminates his personality and his relationships with the others. He is especially fine in his intimate conversation with Solënyi (Peter Krantz) in the second act, though this truly Chekhovian exchange consists of two monologues rather than a true dialogic exchange, and in the painful parting from Irina in the last act when he leaves for the duel, hoping to hear some words, any words, of affection from her, but gets for his efforts a confession that she does not love him and probably cannot love anyone. Krantz, too, is effective in helping the audience, on the one hand, to understand Solënyi's acceptance into the Prozorovs' social circle and, on the other, to fear the violent outbursts sparked by his social insecurity. These sudden explosions, by the way, twin him with Natasha, who also turns on others suddenly and inexplicably.

The director, Jackie Maxwell, reveals quietly and yet firmly a traditional respect for the play's choreography, inspired no doubt by the playwright's management of the entrances and exits of characters as well as his groupings of characters — at one critical moment, characters both seen and unseen — and the interaction of smaller groups of people placed in different playing areas on the stage. Maxwell and her designers have used the large playing space in the Festival Theatre to produce shimmering images of light and space in the first and last act of the play. The sets of the inner, dark acts, however, do not convey the clutter and the drastic restriction of space for the sisters brought on by the growing physical and spiritual presence of Natasha, who appears at the beginning of these acts, establishes their oppressive tints, and heightens the suffocating atmosphere. Quite wrong, however, is Maxwell's accentuation of one area that Chekhov rarely utilized. In the Shaw production the floor becomes a major playing level. The characters sit on the floor or drop to their knees on the floor or fall and/or writhe on the floor, and Masha, after refusing to release Vershinin from their last embrace, is almost thrown to the ground by him. One might expect characters from a Dostoevskii novel to sink to the floor and grovel or confess their sins to the assembled crowd or for criminals in a peasant tragedy to begin their journey to a Siberian prison by begging their community's forgiveness. But for Chekhov's figures to occupy this space suggests that the playwright failed in his mission of, if not overturning, then at least avoiding many of the excesses of conventional melodrama.

One other serious flaw in this production is that the director's reading of the play fails to mark more prominently the changes the characters undergo over the course of the four years of the play's action. After the quiet holocaust of the third act has devastated many of the characters' illusions about themselves and their world, the last act suggests in many quiet ways the transformations that are in process: it is in the last act that Vershinin has trouble filling the time with philosophizing, and Andrei, oddly enough, takes over Vershinin's role as prophet to rhapsodize over life in the future; Masha will never again enter her old house, now controlled by Natasha; Irina not only agrees to marry a man she does not love but has grown up and matured so rapidly in the last years that it is Kulygin rather than she who is given a gift in parting from Rodè; and it is Ol'ga who at the very end of the play, as the leading voice in the sisters' trio at the play's conclusion, admits that she and they do not know why and for what they live, an uncertainty that she had never admitted before.

Time, of course, is the most important topic of the play, which, as many have noted, contains on almost each and every page of the script some reference to time or some image related to the passing of time or the memory of the past or the shape of time to come. So the dynamic response of the characters to experience in time must be embodied on stage to release the greater reverberations of the drama's thematic core and to generate, both in the theatre and after, a more intense impact.

© Ralph Lindheim

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