The Three Sisters

Southwark Playhouse 77-85 Newington Causeway
The Three Sisters image
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Event has ended
This event ended on Saturday 3rd of May 2014
Admission
£18, Conc £16
Venue Information
Southwark Playhouse
77-85 Newington Causeway, SE1 6BD
Nearest Tube/Rail Stations
Elephant & Castle 0.17 miles

“You won’t be here. Not in thirty years. You’ll have had a stroke, or I’ll have shot you. It’ll be one or the other.”

Three sisters. Three thousand miles from home. Overworked Olga, wild Masha and idealistic Irina dream of returning. Living in a world of deceit, desire and hard drinking it’s difficult but is there something else holding them back?

Reinterpreted for the 21st century by Anya Reiss, (winner, Most Promising Playwright at the Evening Standard Awards and Critics Circle Awards 2010) this searing new version of Chekhov’s masterpiece reunites the team behind 2012′s critically acclaimed, sell-out hit, The Seagull and is co-produced by the award winning producer of last year’s smash hit, Titanic.

Tags: Theatre

All In London Review

a play filled with humanity, humour and tragedy that had me gripped

Review Image
I'm not going to pretend to write this from an intellectual, high-brow point of view; truth be told, I'd barely heard of Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov, and certainly had no idea he'd written a play called The Three Sisters which was first performed in Moscow 1901. I went along to this modern version of The Three Sisters at the Southwark Playhouse to enjoy a night out, and that I did. Anya Reiss is the young playwright that has transposed this well known and loved play of the last century, into the modern age. The three sisters here are all beautiful, intelligent and eloquent young women yearning to be back in London, but being stuck financially in the middle-eastern country that their late father was stationed to eleven years earlier.

I accept that many of the nuances of the play were no doubt lost on me, and some parts of the transposition into today's world seems to work more easily than others; I can't really imagine that such striking and intelligent women would have found no route home should they really have wished for it, but I can overlook all of that. What Chekhov and Reiss together created was a play filled with humanity, humour and tragedy that had me gripped for the entire first half. Admittedly the second half felt rather less compelling, perhaps because all optimism and humour had been sapped away by events, and therefore it was less fun to watch, but the overall performance was still triumphant. Holliday Granger as the youngest sister Irina, was exceptional; totally believable, natural and compelling throughout; a real star of the show.

The show runs at The Southwark Playhouse until 3 May 2014

Reviewed by All In London
Published on Apr 10, 2014


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