Review Three Sisters

Three Sisters 
by Anton Chekhov
In A New Version by Tracy Letts

Home And Away
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

The world in this spare adaptation of Chekhov's penultimate play, kept by playwright Tracy Letts in an early twentieth century milieu, turns in jerks and starts like the beat in The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go which marks the final note of this production.

The three sisters, brought up in Moscow, come from an army family, their late father a general sent to a provincial garrison town.

Schoolteacher Olga (Celine Abrahams) and Masha (Ivy Corbin), who married young but has grown to despise her husband (Steven Rodgers), chafe against their rural life. The youngest, romantic Irina (Molly Crookes) works at the telegraph office. Her nostalgia for Moscow is the most intense, like her sisters feeling herself a cut above her local neighbours, longing to and believing she will return to the bright lights of the populous city.

The military stationed in their town, with a round of social events, provides the sisters' chief distraction, albeit, as happeed once to their own family, they can be moved on at any time. However, the sisters also pin their hopes on the sole son of the family, their violin-playing brother Andrey (Benjamin Chandler), whom they believe has the wherewithal to become a professor.

Masha has become romantically attached to commanding officer Vershinin (Ashley Russell), trapped in an unhappy marriage. Officers, gentle piano-playing Tusenbach (Ian Malmed) and aggressive Solyony (Hugo Nicholson), pursue flighty Irina.

They barely register at first how their brother has rooted himself in the town, becoming entangled with local girl, the ill-educated but ambitious Natasha (Francesca Burgoyne).

 With the title shortened to the more casual, less portentous Three Sisters (originally The Three Sisters), this play aims to cross the time divide by shorning the piece of most of its specifically Russian social and literary references.

This has both positives and negatives. The production at the Union Theatre, directed by Phil Willmott, has a cinematic quality - voices drift from rooms off the in-the-round stage, actions halt in meaningful glances and pauses.

Small but effective moments, verbal and non verbal, are scattered across the play like sharp visceral pin pricks. Irina's superior grimace, for example, when exiting the room containing the socially awkward Natasha, little knowing the relationsip with Andrey.

Nevertheless, there are drawbacks. There is an unevenness in tone in the denuded script with its many pauses. Its spareness feels at the expense of the relationship between the three sisters, along with the plot and a flattening of the drama's natural ebb and flow.

Natasha's role with the most strident lines as she gains in power becomes magnified, the self-reproach of the elderly doctor Chebutykin (despite a relaxed and engaging performance by JP Turner) is diminished, the turning point fire loses dramatic urgency the relationship between characters viewed from the outside rather than felt from the inside.

At the same time, there's no doubting the visual and verbal appeal of the strong cast, along with lucid design - costumes by Penn O'Gara and a soundscape by Sebastian Atterbury. The production slips purposefully from the brightly lit family drawing room to a simple bench in twilight gloom with hints of a railway station caught in time.

Letts is probably best known otherwise for his tale of family torment, Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then film, August: Osage County. Moments of zest and delicacy have impact in Three Sisters, but finally this adaptation of the play seems just too subtle and filmic and it's an amber light for an interesting if somewhat impaired version of the Chekhov classic.
   

Review Bug

Bug
By Tracy Letts

Swatting It
 http://found111.co.uk/ 

Strange and horrible things happen in  fictional motels:  Stabbings in showers in Psycho, paedophilia in Lolita, Thelma and Louise running from  the law before a final cliff-hanger,  a helpless female saved from mobsters by a Brit secret service agent in the novel The Spy Who Loved Me, drugs and murder in Touch of Evil. 

To this litany of weirdness and characters, playwright Tracy Letts added Agnes and Peter in Bug. Pothead Agnes (Kate Fleetwood)  is holed up in an Oaklahoma motel room with only a crack pipe for company, avoiding her ex-con ex-husband Jerry (Alec Newman). 

That's save for  the occasional visit of lesbian friend RC (Daisy Lewis). RC brings along gentle giant (shades of Steinbeck another motel afficianado) Peter (James Norton), seemingly a Gulf War veteran who introduces himself fetchingly saying, "I'm not an axe murderer", only that he "makes people nervous" because he "picks up on things".

He's certainly no Jack Torrance in The Shining , but gradually Peter starts to drop the odd line drawing Agnes, already susceptible to National Enquirer type stories,  into a world view veering from the comically conspiratorial to the fatally self-destructive. 

And those things he picks up on? They turn out to have a corporeal manifestation - a supposed insect infestation where the remedy proves worse than living with those pesky microscopic critters.

Bug, mixing Hitchcock with Kafka with Hollywood and comic book scifi horror, a hefty dollop of the X-Files and even a nightmare possibly from an Ian McEwan novel,  premiered in London in 1996.

But this was also post Watergate and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and very real health fears for Gulf War veterans. And the year of a real Asian beetle infestation in New York plus journalists revealing  the CIA promotion of crack cocaine importation to fund right-wing rebel groups in Nicaragua.

Yet in the end, the power of Bug the play lies not in state conspiracy, but how far over the edge the isolated and disappointed - and drug-addled - can be pushed and nudged into pushing themselves.

Still, lines thrown in at times - "Women aren't my bag" and "I'm playing devil's advocate" throw into question the delusion and self-knowledge of the couple. If - in a play written before mass internet usage - the media, literature, film, the news, even the psychology of acting and the creation of "character" are the instigators or results of tragedy.

With the audience as voyeurs on every side and looming plaster beams - there's a Psycho bathroom in one corner, the seedy motel room door and window at the other - it's an evening of proximities.

The changing light (lighting designer Richard Howell) outside is just discernible through the cheap curtains as Agnes crosses to the mini bar in the third corner wedged between members of the audience. Indeed viewed from above the bedroom set may even resemble a bug's compound eye.;)

There are subtle sound effects from Edward Lewis from the first chirping cricket (it's not a spoiler to say that this jiminy cricket gets the chop)  to the real or imaginary helicopters circling overhead near the end.

The Charing Cross Road venue proves perfect for this visceral grunge production directed by Simon Evans (oh, did we mention James Norton was in it?:)), both as a former art school and as the dilapidated grafitti-strewn home of Found 111. Whether the play would have the same impact on a formal proscenium stage is debatable.

Kate Fleetwood's Agnes and James Norton's Peter crash and burn, gnawing into themselves, within touching distance and it's the physical nearness which resonates, Daisy Lewis's RC and Alec Newman's Jerry frame the action of the junkie couple with strong performances. While Carl Prekopp's role of Dr Sweet  seems not so much underwritten as deliberately jarring.

With a nightmarish comic book quality, TLT and her own little bug(gy) laughed,  cringed and gasped spontaneously in the right places. Be prepared for blood, gore, dentistry beyond Marathon Man, alongside extreme population pest control and you'll have an enjoyable shlock horror rollercoaster evening. A green light.