REVIEW: Playbox Theatre present a humorous and brilliantly acted take on Chekhov’s tragicomedy Three Sisters

Steve Sutherland reviews Three Sisters, Dream Factory, Playbox Theatre, Warwick, 22nd to 25th March

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YOU know the Prozorovs. Yes, you do. It may be 1900, they may be in Russia and the revolution may be just around the corner but you know them alright. Or people just like them. They’re akin to those folks you used to meet through Friends Reunited. Remember that? One of the worst ideas ever. A website which could put you back in touch with with individuals you were once at school, college or work with. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty as it happens. But let’s not get into that now. Where was I? Oh yes, the Prozorovs.

I’m not suggesting they’re like those reacquaintances who turned out to be doing really rather super well thank you very much running multi-million quid businesses - a grim blow to our self-esteem. As Morrissey once so wisely pointed out before he became an insufferable, self-obsessed bore: we hate it when our friends become successful. I’m not thinking of the liars or the fantasists or even the psychos - those who kept hidden their adolescent hots for you and now, emboldened by the passing of time, see fit to declare their undying love, just like that sad little man in the restaurant with Frances McDormand in Fargo.

No, I’m talking about the worst ones of all – those who looked like they had some promise about them back in the day only for you to discover that they squandered all that potential and did naff-all with it. The stay-at-homes, the ones who let their dreams wither and die, the ones who never escaped where and who they came from, never acted on their aspirations, never achieved what they thought they were due. Maybe they were frightened off by the prospect of failure. Maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was sloth, but whatever the reason they never made the break or took the plunge. So, there they are, stuck where they always were, geographically anchored, all ambition snuffed out, their inertia partly an affront and partly a spur to those still striving to move up and out and on.

These are the couldabeens, shouldadones but neverdids, and that – largely but not entirely - is what Three Sisters is about. We meet the titular sisters in their drawing room. They, and their brother, are aristocratic orphans living in what they consider exile in a small town populated with people they deem their intellectual inferiors. They are doting on a dimly-remembered upper crust life in Moscow to where they assume they’ll soon return. Trouble is, both nature and nurture have conspired against them having any ability to achieve their goals and, although they endlessly plan and talk the talk, they have no wherewithal when it comes to walking the walk.

So, here they are and here they stay. Amelie Friess is Olga, the oldest sister, who we find in full-on matriarchal mode complaining of constant headaches brought about, she says, by having to teach pupils at a local school to make ends meet. She’s haughty but jittery and Friess does both exceedingly well. Taya Ashley-Timms is Masha, the middle one, neatly underplayed and quietly brooding, ever on the verge of a breakdown as she was married off young and is now emotionally shattered and utterly bored with hubby Kulygin. He's an insufferable, toadying goon, also a teacher at the local school, played with magnificent pomposity by Liam Browne. The youngest is Lucy Griffiths’ Irina, fresh out of her teens and sunny with expectation. We feel from the start, she will fall the furthest.

Quillan Mitchell is the brother, Andrey, the one who fiddles about on his violin and who, according to his sisters, is their guaranteed salvation as he will become a university professor and transport them all back to Moscow. Not built with broad enough shoulders, Mitchell’s Andrey is a faffer-about and inevitably lets them all down, winding up with some position on the local council, remortgaging the family home to pay off gambling debts and passive-aggressively irritable as his snobbily frowned-upon marriage to the much-mocked, mousey local gal Natasha quickly turns sour. Mery Sutherland is the calculating, upwardly mobile bride-turned-doting-mama/ bully and her irresistible rise to dominion – punctuated by revengeful explosions of the screaming ab-dabs – is the brutal reverse of Olga’s miserable descent. None are equipped to deal with her nascent guile and she conquers them all, usurps them with alarming ease. She does stuff, they don’t, and she’s the only one who gets what she wants, the only one approximating happiness. Everyone and everything else is bleak to put it mildly.

But despite the dour reputation of Chekhov’s works (Three Sisters was his last play), under the sharp direction of Mary King, this production is sardonically really very funny. This is principally down to three marvellous characters: Gianluca Bucci’s effusive Vershinin, a cuckolding soldier with a suicidal wife and two small daughters who very much likes the sound of his own voice and suavely woos middle sis Masha so she’s almost out of her mind by the time he abruptly submits to his duties and exits to his new posting in Poland. Then there’s Corin Alford’s Cherbutykin, an aged doctor who likes a drink, has forgotten pretty much everything he ever knew and has lately “done in” a local lady on account of his dodgy medicinal administrations. Alford’s great at sozzled reprobates. And finally there’s Ferapont, a near-deaf old duffer unsuited to his role as the carrier of messages played hilariously as a senile reptile by Phoebe Roberts.

Few of these characters are deserving of our sympathy and, as they wallow in their own pathetic self-pity and perceived “suffering", Chekhov gives them lines so we can laugh at, not with, them. Like when Irina, beautifully innocent of the implicit irony, declares she’s sick of the work she does in the telegram office because there’s "no poetry" in it. “I’m 24,” he says, or something like that, “and I’ve been working forever!” Work to the Prozorovs is a societal fad which they ideologically embrace only to recoil in horror from its grim actuality.

Three Sisters was quite radical when it was first performed 124 years ago because nothing actually happens on stage and no-one had (not) done that before. All the action – the fatal duel between Milo Aggiss’ Baron Tusenback - about to enter a loveless marriage to Irina – and Sam Almond's jealous creepy nutter Solyony takes place off in the wings somewhere, as does the fire that sweeps through the town and Natasha’s illicit canoodling with the never-seen Protopopov, Andrey’s boss. So, with pusillanimity the predominant theme, presenting this Three Sisters in the round was smart thinking. The audience was fully engaged in the inaction at all times and the players’ impeccably clear delivery of lines meant we could hang on every word and detail; vital in keeping us engrossed considering there’s so little to see.

But best of all about this splendid performance was, when you come to think about it, how many of the cast were roughly the same ages as the characters they played, at least at the beginning of the play when they were young and full of hope and confidence.

By the end, though, a mere three years marked by the hollow ticking of a clock, each of the Prozorov family members are “tired”, defeated, their spirits broken, their futures nullified, psychologically aged. They grudgingly accept that their lives henceforth will consist of frustrated disappointment. In other words, the polar opposite of where our cast members actually find themselves in reality.

Thanks to their talent, nurtured by Playbox and the opportunities, training and exemplary standards the ‘Box has provided and instilled in them, they’re already stepping into their tomorrows and there’s a fighting chance they’ll never get to utter that damned trinity of awful little words: “If only I…”