Martin Esslin reviews
Three Sisters/ Old Vic
Plays and Players, 1967
Twice Three Sisters within
three months: what an opportunity
for the London play-goer to sample one of the world’s greatest plays and to
compare the performances of some of this country’s best actors and actresses!
If, on balance, the national Theatre seems to me to win by a narrow
margin—thanks largely to superior resources all round—the Royal Court
certainly does not emerge without honor from the contest.
There are few plays which could provide a richer texture, a more
meticulously orchestrated score for just such an exercise.
As always in Chekhov’s great plays each character is a study in depth;
with a true master’s economy Chekhov is capable of putting the matter of a
three hundred-page novel about a character into a few dozen lines, thereby
creating wonderful opportunities for the actors.
And each strand of the story, while always kept absolutely clear and
distinct, is woven into a symphonic structure of immense subtlety—a God-sent
opportunity to any director worth his salt.
If William Gaskill’s production at the Royal Court was spare, swift and
dry, Laurence Olivier’s is elaborately ornamented, meticulously detailed,
slower, broader, more leisurely. Each
of these approaches has its advantages and disadvantages.
I personally preferred Edward Bond’s colloquial, more modern
translation to Moura Budberg’s which the National Theatre uses. Josef
Svoboda’s set on the other hand, has the advantage over Abd’Elakader
Farrah’s, not only because the Old Vic’s stage is more spacious, but because
Svoboda’s is brilliantly original and simple.
Instead of solid walls Svoboda uses screens made up of cords or strings,
which can, by the use of light alone, be turned into walls covered by wallpaper
(if a projector is used on them from the front) or into a network of forest
branches traversed by beams of sunlight (if lit from behind).
The projection of the towers of Moscow on the drop curtain which spills
over on to the stage itself as the curtain rises is another brilliant and
imaginative touch (except for one dreadful lapse of taste at the end; but more
of that in its place).
As to the acting: the Royal
Court’s production had, in my opinion at least, only two
sisters, the third one being in the hands of an attractive girl who lacked
acting experience. Here Louise
Purnell is a revelation in the part of Irina:
her outburst of grief and frustration in the third act is heart-rending,
terribly real and genuinely felt; and she is able to portray the gradual loss of
youth and hope of a girl between the ages of twenty and twenty-five:
at the end, although still young and pretty, she already has the mark of
middle-age and old spinsterhood imprinted on her.
Jean Plowright is, as always, warm, intelligent, witty and capable of
generating powerful emotional climaxes. Hers
is a wonderful performance. Yet, by
a narrow margin, I prefer Glenda Jackson’s rendering of the part:
it had more bitterness, more hatred of her situation:
this was a nastier woman, and
yet, as one felt the pressures which had made her so, a more tragic
Masha. Yet—what other city in the world could offer two such great
performances side by side? We are
fortunate in having actresses of the calibre of Joan Plowright and of Glenda
Jackson among us! Jeanne Watts as
the oldest of the three sisters has authority and pathos. I don’t, however, think she equals Arvil Elgar’s Olga at
the Royal Court.
The sisters’ brother, Andrei, is in the hands of an actor new to me
(although I see from the National Theatre programme that he has been playing
tiny parts since 1965)—Anthony Hopkins. If
he is the product of the training he has received by working in the company, the
National Theatre has justified itself triumphantly:
for he must be hailed as a major discovery who is certain to go very far
indeed: a young man with the
makings of a great heavy character hero, relaxed and yet powerful, a future
Wolfit or McKern. He manages to
make this Andrei anything but a booby (as he so often becomes, as he even became
when George Cole—that fine comedian, who was rather miscast in the
part—played him at the Royal Court). This
is an intelligent, weak-willed, somewhat spoiled and over-taxed young man, who
destroys himself by falling victim to an irrational passion for a worthless
woman, and knows it all the time, yet cannot resist it.
Sheila Reid as the woman in the case is also first-rate.
The Royal Court had a remarkable Solyony in John Shepherd.
The National Theatre has an equally remarkable one:
F rank Wylie: less
hysterical than John Shepherd, but even more sinister by his suppressed
neurosis. This is one of the key
parts of the play: this psychotic
officer, who loves Irina hopelessly not only provides the climax of the plot by
shooting her fiancé; he also symbolizes the madness at the core of the society
which Chekhov indicts in the play, its irrational, destructive self-hatred, its
romanticism (Solyony admires the poet Lermontov) which has deteriorated into an
idiotic and sterile urge to destroy and torture.
The old drunken army doctor, Chebutikin, stands for another aspect of
this society: its sheer stupidity
and ignorance. Paul Curran plays
the heart-rending scene of drunken insight into himself without a trace of
self-pity and with breath-taking effect. The
third in the gallery of male grotesques, Masha’s husband, the schoolmaster
Kuligin is portrayed with equal sureness of touch by Kenneth Mackintosh:
loud, coarse-grained, stupid, with a childish sense of humor, and yet, in
spite of all, a truly good and loving man.
In the two male leads the National Theatre has the edge over the Royal
Court. Derek Jacobi’s Baron
Tusenbach is, above all, young enough, awkward enough, unattractive enough, to
make one understand Irina’s inability to fall in love with him.
At the same time he is intelligent, kind and talented enough to make one
truly sorry for him.
Michael Gwynne’s Vershinin at the Royal Court was admirable.
Dry, ironical, upright. But
Robert Stephens at the Old Vic adds another dimension, that of comedy:
he has grasped that this is not only the hero of a sad love story but a
character seen by a great satirist, who is also a ridiculous figure, the
‘lovesick major’ of the sisters’ childhood, a man who escapes from his
personal inadequacy into the pose of a romantic philosopher, who keeps on
harping on the rosy future of humanity. Robert
Stephens admirably suggests the complacency, the self-admiration of the man,
while keeping his tragic side, his happy marriage, his hopeless love equally
strongly before us. This is a
performance of infinite complexity, a masterpiece of an actor’s creative
imagination.
Sir Laurence Olivier is the director who has elicited these performances.
It is a tremendous achievement: and
the production abounds in beautiful poetic touches. Vershinin’s and Masha’s hands seeking each other on the
round tiled stove, for example, a wonderful image!
There is only one lapse which mars one’s admiration.
At the very end, when Olga speaks of her longing to know the meaning of
their suffering, the military march of the departing army suddenly changes into
a loud choral rendering of the International and as the curtain drops, the
towers of old Moscow give way to a projection of Lenin’s tomb!
Well, well! I would not
dream of objecting to this on political
grounds (although the suggestion that twenty years of Stalinism, that the
imprisonment of writers like Sinyavsky and Daniel, were the happy purpose and
goal of the sisters’ suffering strikes me as distinctly odd:
for that after all is the reign of Solyony in person).
Far be it from me, as I say, to object to this interpretation on
political grounds: after all, this
is a free country and Sir Laurence is entitled to his opinions:
I object to it as being in terribly bad taste and totally at variance
with Chekhov’s intentions as clearly outlined in the play.
Are we really to believe that the human suffering so movingly portrayed
by Chekhov could have any purpose, or
that that purpose could revealed to us, sixty years after Chekhov’s death as
easily as that? Surely not.
There is only one consolation: few
people recognize the International in this country.
I doubt whether anyone in the audience really noticed this horrible final
touch, or indeed whether they recognized the point of the Kremlin wall
projection . . . Even so, it should be removed.
It is a blot on an otherwise great and exhilarating performance.