A Brilliantly Experimental Multi-Lingual Reimagining of Chekhov’s Three Sisters
Alienation, from themselves and each other, is the recurring theme of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Masha, Olga and Irina long to return to Moscow, but we sense that beneath that there is a more innate longing: for their lives to make sense to themselves. It is these feelings of loss and alienation that Not Quite Three Sisters turns up to the extreme.
It is a wonderfully bold and experimental reimagining. Three directors (Mia Cousins, Shuxin (Theresa) Si, Shuyi Alice Wang), each responsible for a sister, each sister speaking a different language. The three sisters drift dreamlike through surreal scenes as video montage layers itself into the story. We find ourselves inside their alienation itself as if the original play is turned inside out. It’s an incredibly original and bold way of making theatre. As with all good experimental work, there is a real sense that anything is possible, that no idea is off limits.
This all takes place on Lynia Cao’s elegant set. Markings on the floor trace out a house with no front door; a stack of screens flicks between Buster Keaton movies, grainy war footage and 90s-esque pink pixel art; translucent screens appear and disappear as walls or frames. It’s a design that manages to tie together the varied and abstract ideas of the play – no mean feat for a play this complex.
The play is at its best when the ideas of the three directors feel layered over one another and interwoven. In these moments, it’s brilliant and enthralling. At times, the ideas feel sequential, and this is when the cohesiveness of the play suffers a little. That said, it’s a play of such frequent and clever ideas that these moments pass quickly and – as with all experimental theatre – taste factors hugely. Some ideas won’t work for some people, but the ones which do will really work.
It’s a play which trusts its audience. That trust in and of itself is moving. There is a real feeling of the play asking the audience to reimagine what theatre can be, should be, could be.
What’s most successful is how well it explores how lost these women are and how far from one another they are. There’s a profound loneliness in all three of them – a sense of being displaced from time and the rhythm of life. Perhaps the most moving part of the play is a monologue about whether an arrow is ever really moving or whether it is a thousand moments of stillness all tied together by perception. Are these sisters like that? If they should get back to Moscow, would anything change? If they were to speak the same language, would they be able to understand each other?
It’s not perfect. There are a few moments where it doesn’t quite work, but that is a natural hazard of a play so ambitious. This is experimental theatre at its boldest and most exciting.