Three Sisters (play)

For the musical written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, see Three Sisters (musical).
"Tri sestry" redirects here. For Czech punk rock band, see Tři sestry.
Three Sisters

Cover of first edition, published 1901 by Adolf Marks
Written by Anton Chekhov
Characters

Prozorov family:

  • Olga Sergeyevna Prozorova
  • Maria Sergeyevna Kulygina
  • Irina Sergeyevna Prozorova
  • Andrei Sergeyevich Prozorov
Date premiered 1901 (1901), Moscow
Original language Russian
Genre Drama
Setting A provincial Russian garrison town
Chekhov in a 1905 illustration.

Three Sisters (Russian: Три сeстры, translit. Tri sestry) is a play by the Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. It was written in 1900 and first performed in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre. The play is sometimes included on the short list of Chekhov's outstanding plays, along with The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya.[1]

Characters

The Prozorovs

The soldiers

Stanislavski as Vershinin

Others

Unseen characters

The play has several important characters who are talked about frequently, but never seen onstage. These include Protopopov, head of the local Council and Natasha's lover; Vershinin's suicidal wife and two daughters; and Andrey and Natasha's children Bobik and Sofia. JL Styan contends in his The Elements of Drama that in the last act Chekhov revised the text to show that Protopopov is the real father of Sofia: "The children are to be tended by their respective fathers" — Andrey pushes Bobik in his pram, and Protopopov sits with Sofia.[2][3]

Plot

Act I

Act one begins with Olga (the eldest sister) working as a teacher in a school, but at the end of the play she is made Headmistress, a promotion in which she had little interest. Masha, the middle sister and the artist of the family (she was trained as a concert pianist), is married to Feodor Ilyich Kulygin, a schoolteacher. At the time of their marriage, Masha, younger than he, was enchanted by what she took to be wisdom, but seven years later, she sees through his pedantry and his clownish attempts to compensate for the emptiness between them. Irina, the youngest sister, is still full of expectation. She speaks of her dream of going to Moscow and meeting her true love. It was in Moscow that the sisters grew up, and they all long to return to the sophistication and happiness of that time. Andrei is the only boy in the family and the sisters idolize him. He is in love with Natalia Ivanovna (Natasha), who is somewhat common in relation to the sisters and suffers under their glance. The play begins on the first anniversary of their father's death, but it is also Irina's name-day, and everyone, including the soldiers (led by the gallant Vershinin) bringing with them a sense of noble idealism, comes together to celebrate it. At the very close of the act, Andrei exultantly confesses his feelings to Natasha in private and fatefully asks her to marry him.

Act II

Act two begins about 21 months later with Andrei and Natasha married with their first child (offstage), a baby boy named Bobik. Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov, Andrei's superior, a character who is mentioned but never seen onstage. Masha comes home flushed from a night out, and it is clear that she and her companion, Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin, are giddy with the secret of their mutual love for one another. Little seems to happen but that Natasha manipulatively quashes the plans for a party in the home, but the resultant quiet suggests that all gaiety is being quashed as well. Tuzenbach and Solyony both declare their love for Irina.

Act III

Act three takes place about a year later in Olga and Irina's room (a clear sign that Natasha is taking over the household as she asked them to share rooms so that her child could have a different room). There has been a fire in the town, and, in the crisis, people are passing in and out of the room, carrying blankets and clothes to give aid. Olga, Masha and Irina are angry with their brother, Andrei, for mortgaging their home, keeping the money to pay off his gambling debts and conceding all his power to his wife. However, when faced with Natasha's cruelty to their aged family retainer, Anfisa, Olga's own best efforts to stand up to Natasha come to naught. Masha, alone with her sisters, confides in them her romance with Vershinin ("I love, love, love that man"). At one point, Kulygin (her husband) blunders into the room, doting ever more foolishly on her, and she stalks out. Irina despairs at the common turn her life has taken, the life of a municipal worker, even as she rails at the folly of her aspirations and her education ("I can't remember the Italian for 'window'"). Out of her resignation, supported in this by Olga's realistic outlook, Irina decides to accept Tuzenbach's offer of marriage even though she does not love him. Chebutykin drunkenly stumbles and smashes a clock which had belonged to the Prozorov siblings' late mother, whom he loved. Andrei then vents his self-hatred, acknowledges his own awareness of life's folly and his disappointment in Natasha, and begs his sisters' forgiveness for everything.

Act IV

In the fourth and final act, outdoors behind the home, the soldiers, who by now are friends of the family, are preparing to leave the area. A flash-photograph is taken. There is an undercurrent of tension because Solyony has challenged the Baron (Tuzenbach) to a duel, but Tuzenbach is intent on hiding it from Irina. He and Irina share a heartbreaking delicate scene in which she confesses that she cannot love him, likening her heart to a piano whose key has been lost. Just as the soldiers are leaving, a shot is heard, and Tuzenbach's death in the duel is announced shortly before the end of the play. Masha has to be pulled, sobbing, from Vershinin's arms, but her husband willingly, compassionately and all too generously accepts her back, no questions asked. Olga has reluctantly accepted the position of permanent headmistress of the school where she teaches and is moving out. She is taking Anfisa with her, thus rescuing the elderly woman from Natasha.

Irina's fate is uncertain but, even in her grief at Tuzenbach's death, she wants to persevere in her work as a teacher. Natasha remains as the chatelaine, in charge and in control of everything. Andrei is stuck in his marriage with two children, the only people that Natasha cares about, besides herself. As the play closes, the three sisters stand in a desperate embrace, gazing off as the soldiers depart to the sound of a band's gay march. As Chebutykin sings Ta-ra-ra-boom-di-ay to himself,[nb 1] Olga's final lines call out for an end to the confusion all three feel at life's sufferings and joy: "If we only knew... If we only knew".

Premiere

The work was written for the Moscow Art Theatre and it opened on 31 January 1901, under the direction of Constantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stanislavsky acted Vershinin and the sisters were Olga Knipper (for whom Chekhov wrote the part of Masha), Margarita Savetskaya as Olga and Maria Andreyeva as Irina. Maria Lilina (Stanislavsky's wife) was Natasha, Vsevolod Meyerhold appeared as Tusenbach, Leonid Leonidov was Solyony and Alexander was Artem Chebutykin.[4]

Reception was mixed: Chekhov felt that Stanislavsky's "exuberant" direction had masked the subtleties of the work, and only Knipper had shown her character developing in the manner the playwright had intended. In the director's view the point was to show the hopes, aspirations and dreams of the characters, but audiences were affected by the pathos of the sisters' loneliness and desperation and by their eventual, uncomplaining acceptance of their situation. Nonetheless the piece proved popular and soon it became established in the company's repertoire.[5][6]

Notable productions

Dates Production Director Notes
24 May 1965 BBC Home Service John Tydeman English translation by Elisaveta Fen; adapted for radio by Peter Watts; cast included Paul Scofield, Lynn Redgrave, Ian McKellen, Jill Bennett, among others[7]
29 September 1979 The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon Trevor Nunn Version by Richard Cottrell[8]
30 August - 13 October 2007 Soulpepper Theatre, Toronto László Marton Version by Nicolas Billon with László Marton
29 July - 3 August 2008 Playhouse, QPAC, Brisbane Declan Donnellan Chekhov International Theatre Festival (Moscow), part of Brisbane Festival 2008
5 May 2009 - 14 June 2009 Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland Jon Kretzu Adapted by Tracy Letts[9]
12 January - 6 March 2011 Classic Stage Company, NYC Austin Pendleton Real-life husband and wife actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard starred.[10]

Notes

  1. Contemporary audiences would have recognised this song, from 1892, as Chebutykin's ironic reference to the doomed affair between Masha and Vershinin — Rayfield, Donald (2005). Gottlieb, Vera, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. London: Routledge. p. 210. ISBN 9780521589178.

References

  1. Harold Bloom, Genius.
  2. Styan, John L. (1960). The Elements of Drama. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 209. ISBN 0-521-09201-9.
  3. Three Sisters Act 4, Julius West's translation: "NATASHA: Mihail Ivanitch Protopopov will sit with little Sophie, and Andrei Sergeyevitch can take little Bobby out. ... [Stage direction] ANDREY wheels out the perambulator in which BOBBY is sitting."
  4. Efros, Nikolai (2005). Gottlieb, Vera, ed. Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre. London: Routledge. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-4153-4440-1.
  5. Allen, David (2000). Performing Chekhov. London, UK: Routledge. pp. 27–28. ISBN 978-0-4151-8934-7.
  6. Hingley, Ronald (1998). Five Plays. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. xix. ISBN 978-0-192-83412-6.
  7. Paul Scofield: Radio and Spoken Word 1960s-1970s from scofieldsperformances.com
  8. Gottlieb, Vera. "Select stage productions". The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 255. ISBN 978-0-521-58117-2.
  9. "Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Tracy Letts". Artists Repertory Theatre. Retrieved 26 October 2009. This adaptation of the Russian masterpiece was commissioned by Artists Rep as part three of its four-part Chekhov project. Letts gives us a fresh, new look at the decay of the privileged class and the search for meaning in the modern world, through the eyes of three dissatisfied sisters who desperately long for their treasured past.
  10. Brantley, Ben (3 February 2011). "‘Three Sisters', Classic Stage Company - Review". The New York Times.
  11. 1942 play review, time.com; accessed 26 January 2015.
  12. Wolf, Matt (27 May 1990). "Theater: Novel Casting for 'Three Sisters'". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
  13. Taylor, Paul (27 January 2010). "Three Sisters, Lyric, Hammersmith, London". The Independent (London).
  14. Brennan, Clare (18 September 2011). "We Are Three Sisters – review". The Guardian (London).

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