Russian colour: Three Sisters by Maly Drama Theatre
Three Sisters
Maly Drama Theatre
Vaudeville Theatre
Dress Circle J8, £15
26 June 2019
Maly page
If I had more set opinions about Three Sisters I don’t doubt that I could have found a certain quantity in Maly Drama Theatre’s production to annoy me, and I wonder what a traditionalist would make of it. Without such impediments, I was able to relax and enjoy the novelty of hearing the original Russian and be entertained by a play that is tenderly thought-provoking even when probably not always quite what Chekhov had in mind.
Got to have a gripe first, though. You could argue that it is on me that I don’t speak Russian, and on me that I don’t know an English translation of Three Sisters well enough to rely on my memory, and you’d be right, albeit rather stern. Allowing your rightness, I will still lament the teeny tiny translations afforded in the surtitles, which as well as being upsettingly brusque were often a line or two behind the many, many phrases they purported to translate. This was a bit of stress I didn’t need in my life, and the only barrier to enjoyment of the evening.
The gripe is annoying because it feels fixable, and would then unleash the full pleasure of seeing the play in Russian. I am almost completely ignorant of the language (Spasiba! Da!) but, just as with music, the colours of the words feel intrinsic to the language they convey, at least with how they were declared here. The most extreme example comes with how ‘lyuba, lyuba, lyuba!’ sounds compared against ‘I love you, I love you, I love you!’. I won’t go down the treacherous path of authenticity – access to a version spoken in English by English speakers is very important – but it is extremely interesting and pleasurable to have this opportunity to consider how the sounds of Russian affect the feeling of the play, and to have the smallest glimpse of how differently a Russian-speaking audience could respond to it from an English-speaking one.
I’m not confident enough in the nuance of their declamation to describe in detail each actor beyond to say they all seemed well cast, particularly Igor Chernevich as Vershinin, at once boorish and dapper, pushy and reticent, sometimes vile, always charismatic. Designs by Alexander Borovsky gently straddle straightforward period in the costumes and a gesture towards more contemporary theatre with a simple facade that moves forwards and backwards to line up, not entirely successfully, the play’s transitions between interior and exterior. Director Lev Dodin seems to take a similar approach: largely respectful, a few decisions that doubtless raised eyebrows, but on the whole seeming to step back and let the cast and the text speak for themselves.
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