Not Quite Three Sisters
After Anton Chekhov
UAL Central St Martins
Platform Theatre
Star rating: 1.5
This is the fourth reworked classic play I’ve seen in a fortnight (cf A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Edward II and Saint Joan). And it is certainly the most experimental: too experimental for its own good. It is, however, always good to see young theatre makers and actors trying out new ideas.
In this show three different directors are each responsible for one of the titular sisters. It’s an interesting idea but it doesn’t make for effective interaction between chrarcters. And although there are different acting methods and approaches in the mix it’s style at the expense of story telling.
Set on geometrically marked floor with a mobile gauze hinged screen, the narrative loosely follows Chekhov’s original in that these three women are unhappy in different ways and the longing to return to Moscow symbolises that. You would, I think, be hard pressed to follow the action much further if you were not familiar with the source material. And there isn’t much dialogue. Much of it is simply characters making statements.
Another experiment is the use of different languages – with surtitles. It starts in a language I didn’t recognise but soon switches to French in which I am reasonably proficient but it was so heavily accented here that it might just have well have been another language I didn’t know. Even the English, when it arrived, was less than clear. Pier Filippo Valensin, who multi-roles the male parts does pretty well with Italian. I suspect it’s his mother tongue. If this polyglot approach is meant to make a statement about universality I’m afraid it doesn’t. It simply muddies the waters still further
I have no idea, sadly, why Shuyl Alice Wang as Irina has an episode lying on a table communing with a folding step ladder or why she stands for quite a while with a white veil over her head looking like an escapee from Ghostbusters. And that’s just one example of the arty weirdness which dogs this production which is trying far too hard to be clever.
Billed at an hour, it actually runs barely 50 minutes. I wasn’t sorry.
