In his stories and plays, Anton Chekhov is a pitilessly intelligent observer of human beings. A writer of enormous moral scrupulousness, he lets fall a cruel light on the excesses of his characters without ever losing sight of their frailties and contradictions. He’s most often seen as a poster boy for naturalism, but this is inevitably reductive. A play like Three Sisters, for instance, can be seen as a moral tale about the decadence of the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie, or a nostalgic evocation of a society on the brink of collapse. But like any simple interpretation, this is far from the whole truth.

Its real fascination is in its details, how it is constructed as a kind of collage of social performance: each character’s self-insight is questionable, conditioned and repressed by his or her consciousness of the presence of others, and each is ultimately trapped in a state of existential solitude. It is this aspect of Chekhov which makes him so attractive to successive generations of artists, among whom must be counted Samuel Beckett. In last year’s drop-dead beautiful production of his early play Platonov, the Hayloft Project, one of Melbourne’s most vital new companies, began an excavation of his work.


Under the restless direction of Simon Stone, they’ve continued their exploration with 3xSisters, now on at the Meat Market in repertory with a remount of the Belvoir St version of their first show, Spring Awakening - a performance so radically changed (different script, different design, different concept, different cast) from its original Melbourne outing that it is effectively an entirely new production. Hayloft's take on Chekhov is an attractively ambitious conceit: three directors - Benedict Hardie, Simon Stone and Mark Winter – oversee different acts, effectively giving us three radically different interpretations of the play. But it's telling that the names of the writers who feature in this mini-Hayloft retrospective - Franz Wedekind and Anton Chekhov - figure nowhere on the program credits.

3xSisters is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The production shifts neurotically through three different sets, costumes and interpretations. Stone, who begins and ends the play, sets it in a place like a waiting room in an airport, under a row of clocks showing the time in Buenos Aires, Johannesburg or Moscow, with the characters in formal dress, as if waiting for some festive event. The actors speak straight out to the audience, their more intimate thoughts sometimes whispered through a microphone, their movements constrained by the narrowness of the stage. It suggests a promisingly stern aesthetic - Stone even inserts the famous quote ("Fail again. Fail better.") from Samuel Beckett's Worstword Ho - but, in the major problem that runs through this entire production, neglects to follow this promise through. The hint of Beckett remains merely decoration, and peters out in the end, disappointingly, into the borrowed emotion of Cat Power.

Hardie directs a deftly choreographed rehearsal of the play, complete with actorly interpolations. It's a reminder of the performance heritage that has so conditioned western interpretations of Chekhov: Chekhov's first and most famous interpreter was Stanislavski, one of whose most famous acolytes was Lee Strasberg, father of the Method. In Hardie's first scene, the black slacks and casual shirts evoke the 1950s cool of the Actors Studio; in the second, the actors have evolved into brainless noughties dweebs, dressed in "I heart Chekhov" t-shirts. This permits a metatheatrical shifting, a consciousness of artifice overlaying the moments when the actors step into character. It's not that new as an idea - David Mamet's film Vanya on 42nd St features actors workshopping the play, similarly shifting between their "real" and performative characters - but it's still effective, and perhaps in its minimalist approach the most satisfyingly thought-through of the evening.

The middle acts, courtesy of Winter, are a psychotic explosion seen through the mind of Solyony, an asocial soldier with Romantic delusions who ends up killing his only friend. Here Chekhov collides with Taxi Driver, with Travis Bickle’s slaughter presaging the Revolution’s murders of the Romanov family. This middle act is at once the most interesting and the most problematic of the lot: there are moments of genuine power, moments when the wholesale destruction of Chekhov suggests wider implications - the repressed violence and sexuality squirming beneath bourgeois social conventions, the classist cruelty that led to the Russian Revolution, even a reflection of how a production can be a forensic dissection of a cultural corpse.

But these possibilities are undermined by cheap gestures: its excessive bath of sexual transgression and violence ends up being brutalising and boring (and sometimes - what was with the Indian head-dress? - simply baffling). As with the rest of the production it's full of quotations, most obviously from Martin Scorcese, but also from a menu of pop cultural and theatrical references. Again, a directorial quote from Romeo Castellucci will mean nothing without the aesthetic rigor that underlies Castellucci's practice: and a swipe at Benedict Andrews is simply a gratuitous in-joke which illuminates nothing except the director's insecurities. At its worst, it justifies the outraged criticisms of those who claim this kind of theatre is simply self-indulgent bullshit only interested in generating offence, in the absence of doing something more challenging (such as engaging with Chekhov); which is a pity, because at its best it has the potential to be something far more substantial.

In short, the line between intellectual provocation and gratuitous shock-value is crossed too often, and the whole production oscillates between genuine insight and shallow gesture. It's interesting to compare these explorations, for instance, with Daniel Schlusser's recent production of Peer Gynt, or more directly, Chris Goode's transcendently beautiful ...Sisters, both of which radically dismantle a classic text. The difference is intellectual rigor, and an illuminating respect for the source text. All the same, I found 3xSisters riveting. The performers are astoundingly good (and very well cast - you can't help reflecting that a straight production with this cast would be really something), and Chekhov, tellingly, survives the rough treatment. It’s well worth seeing, if only for the arguments you’ll have afterwards.


Simon Stone's production of Spring Awakening is a far less problematic prospect. I was expecting a polished version of the show I saw at fortyfive downstairs three years ago, and found very quickly that I was mistaken: the Belvoir St version is a complete rethink, with Adam Gardnir's chicken-coop set literalising the social barriers that confine and destroy Wedekind's young characters. Stone solves some of the problems of the original text - most notably, the Man who appears at the end - by simply editing them out, transforming the play into a series of impressionistic dialogues and monologues.

The most compelling aspect of the initial production was the tension it established between sexual desire and childish innocence, a collision that was ultimately tragic. Literalising the subtleties of physical interaction between the actors, and perhaps even neatening up the original messiness of Wedekind's play, has a concomitant cost: it's undoubtedly more elegant, and perhaps more impressive, but it has lost something important. Innocence, perhaps.

A shorter version of this review is in today's Australian.

Pictures: top: rehearsal shot of 3xSisters. Photo Pia Johnson. Bottom: Production shot of Spring Awakening.

3xSisters from Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, directed by Simon Stone, Benedict Hardie and Mark Winter, additional text from the directors and cast. Set design by Claude Marcos, lighting design by Danny Pettingill. With Gareth Davies, Angus Grant, Thomas Henning, Joshua Hewitt, Shelly Lauman, Eryn Jean Norvill, Anne-Louise Sarks, Katherine Tonkin and Tom Wren.

Spring Awakening by Franz Wedekind, adaptation and direction by Simon Stone. Set design by Adam Gardnir, lighting design by Niklas Pajanti. With Andrew Dunn, Amanda Falson, Angus Grant, Shelly Lauman, Aaron Orzech, Russ Pirie and Edwina Wren.

In repertory at the North Melbourne Meat Market, 5 Blackwood St, North Melbourne, until May 10. Bookings: 9639 0096