Three Sisters
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Neil Cooper
When the once idealistic Renee is asked where her joie de vivre has gone in John Byrne's 1960s update of Chekhov's turn-of-the-century play, it's as heart-breaking an observation as the youngest of the flame-haired brood's own gradual withering in the lifeless limbo of navy-occupied Dunoon. Renee's eldest sibling Olive has long settled for a humdrum existence, while Maddy's studied boredom as she sleepwalks through a loveless marriage is a sharp contrast to Renee's youthful vivacity.
When the sisters' extended family and the similarly exiled navy officers pass each other to a soundtrack of fractured piano chords at the start of Andy Arnold's production, it is as if they are very politely waiting
for death while far-off London swings.
Hope comes in the shape of a portable record player bought by the family's ageing doctor for Renee's twentieth birthday along with some already outmoded trad-jazz records. Renee can only dance towards some imaginary future for so long, however, even as her free-thinking suitor Nick Fairbairn quits the navy, reads Jeff Nuttall's counter-cultural critique, Bomb Culture, and indulges in grand romantic gestures that eventually prove to be his downfall.
There is hope briefly too for Maddy in the form of Andy Clark's dashing submariner, McShane, a welcome breath of life compared to her husband, McCool, played by Stephen Clyde as an infantile tartan Tory who never grew out of public school pecking orders. Another type of future comes in the form of Louise McCarthy's Wemyss Bay girl Natasha, who marries the sisters' wet brother Archie, shoving her way into society like a beehived Barbie doll with claws. Towards the play's end, the unseen response to her crying baby is as shocking as any kitchen-sink tragedy.
Byrne laces his re-imagining of Chekhov with baroque linguistic flourishes and an underlying pathos that accentuates a set of nuanced but never naturalistic performances from Arnold's 10-strong ensemble.
As the sisters, Muireann Kelly, Sally Reid and Jessica Hardwick chart all the pains of a community at odds with itself in a sad elegy of lives left behind.
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