Review: ...Sisters

…Sisters, adapted and directed by Chris Goode from Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Designed by Naomi Dawson, lighting design by Anna Watson. With Gemma Brockis, Catherine Dyson, Julia Innocenti, Helen Kirkpatrick, Tom Lyall and Melanie Wilson. Headlong Theatre @ The Gate, Notting Hill Gate, London, until July 5.

When last we spoke I was in a state of high irritation after seeing Anthony Neilson’s Relocated at the Royal Court. But a theatregoer’s unkillable optimism led me on Saturday to the wilds of London, or at least to Notting Hill Gate, where I climbed yet more stairs to see, this time, a matinee performance of …Sisters, a version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters adapted and directed by Chris Goode. And I gave thanks, for the karmic gods saw to it that there was balance. This production stands with one of the best Chekhov experiences I’ve had.

First, a confession: I’m a bit of a Chekhov fangirl. When I get to that big dinner table in the sky, I hope they seat me next to Anton for at least a few of those eternal moments. His letters reveal him to be a man of great personal charm: he was funny and lively and, which is perhaps most rare, he possessed a coolly humane social conscience, a wholly rational and sceptical compassion that, for example, informed his report on health conditions on the penal island of Sakhalin, and is one of the defining qualities of his work.

It’s this quality, I think, that makes Chekhov one of the more poorly understood playwrights of the modern age: the realisation of his texts demands a special kind of wisdom. The mantel of reverence – or, alternatively, the machismo of anti-reverence – often obscures the intense fragility that animates the strength of his drama. Worse, a grey miasma of contemporary naturalism tends to rise about his work, snuffing out the poetic vitality at its heart.

Goode’s version of Three Sisters has been billed as a “deconstruction”, but this seems like a cold word for what strikes me more as an organic reanimation, an attempt to recover (or perhaps, more accurately, to create) a Chekhov who is continually invested in the raw presence of the moment. At first glance, this appears a quixotic approach to a classic four act naturalistic play, but in fact it is an ambition peculiarly apt to Chekhov’s work. What has always moved me most about Chekhov’s plays is their tragic consciousness of the present, a profound sorrow and comedy that stems equally from the moment’s unbearably beautiful transience, or its crushing boredom, or its pain. For this reason among others, I have often thought that Beckett owes a great deal to Chekhov.

Writing about this production, as is true of all the best theatre experiences, is very difficult. To write it down is inevitably a kind of falsification, as it shifts something that exists almost entirely in the present into the past tense. And memory has its own filters and connectivities, selecting and fictionalising and shaping as it rewrites the experience. All that remains of this production now is what exists in the memory of those who were there.

This acute awareness of mortality (“Each thing once. Only once.”) is the informing feeling of …Sisters, and the reason why it’s so intensely moving. Because of the chance elements Goode and his actors have introduced, each performance is different: no one knows at the beginning who is going to play what parts, or even which lines will be said. However, these variations are played over a deeply thought structure: not only the play (which still preserves its four acts and its language) but in the shape of the production itself. It’s a show that teaches you how to watch it as you watch, profoundly intelligent but also, crucially, profoundly felt. When a character asks: Do we exist? the question resonates intimately in the auditorium: suddenly I felt as fictional – or, conversely, as real - as the characters on the stage. And who’s to say I am not?

Goode has adapted the play into contemporary English and gathered an exceptional cast (it clearly had to be exceptional) of six actors, all of whom learnt the entire text. Then he asked them, as he says in the program, to “dance”. And dance they do. One of the things that took my breath away about this production is its beautiful and subtle choreography, its creation of a continually dynamic space.

…Sisters maintains an exquisite tension between the scripted play and the anarchies of chance. From the moment we enter the space – designed as a comfortably cluttered green room with 19th century touches, complete with electric kettle, walls covered with post-it notes and framed collections of dead butterflies - we see the actors, half costumed, leafing through scripts or wandering idly about the stage, preparing for the show. The emphasis is from the beginning on performance in all its meanings, an awareness which implicates the audience. We are always conscious – we are never permitted to forget – that we are watching a work of theatre.

Goode uses a number of Cagean techniques: the actors choose straws, play spin-the-bottle and pick up at random envelopes containing instructions that drop from the ceiling. Anyone could play any character, and at any point might become someone else. Despite this, it’s a production very strong on clarity: clues are given from the beginning – in costuming and dialogue – to show who is who, although these clues are instantly destabilised. For this reason, it demands close attention. But although my memory of Three Sisters was very vague (I resisted the impulse to reread the play, and merely reacquainted myself with the character list), there was no point where I found myself utterly lost. Perhaps those who don't know the play might be lost, but I suspect what is fruitfully destroyed here is a certain kind of dramatic expectation.

The four acts are very distinct. Act I establishes the play, and sticks most closely to the text as written. Act II stretches the conventions: at one point, for example, there are three Mashas. The love scene between Masha and Vershinin gains a skin-prickling poignancy by being performed in a kind of chorus, the dialogue shifting from one couple to another with no attention to gender. Act III, the dramatic climax, is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to play-as-opera, and is the point where the play's emotional subtext surges rawly to the surface of the performance.

Act IV is a return to stasis, with performers seated staring out at the audience, but now the play is in pieces, literally scattered over the floor for one of the actors, continually circling the others, to pick up and read at random. In a rather Castellucci-ish touch, two rabbits hop onto the stage and lollop around, behaving, as animals and babies do, with a hypnotic lack of self consciousness. I thought it a tribute to the actors that I found myself watching them as closely as I watched the rabbits, which ended up, bored, fast asleep under a desk at the end of the scene. But for all the random elements, the performance begins and ends where the play begins and ends: it still, rather miraculously, attends to Chekhov's dramatic and emotional arc.

I don’t know whether, if he had seen this production, Chekhov would have advised his friends (as he so often did) to “shoot him in the head” if he ever thought about writing another play. But I like to think he might have been pleased: for all its robust approach, ...Sisters seemed to me to be deeply true to him. Certainly, in its peculiar and evanescent transparency, it's a work of exemplary integrity. No wonder people here think Chris Goode is God.