Theatre

I loved Chris Goode’s plangent deconstruction of ‘Three Sisters’. This improvisatory piece, where the actors are prompted by random cues, games and sheer whim to riff on the themes of Chekhov’s play, is like jazz-theatre. And like jazz, it has a yearning, lyrical impact, thanks equally to the live talent of the performers and their inspired original score.

On press night it opened with a letter, unsealed and read by an actress who has never seen it before. ‘We’re in the dark,’ she explains, feelingly. ‘And you’re in the dark, too.’ For the audience, total illumination never comes. (Director Goode has preserved the emotional story of Chekhov’s play through its four-act structure, but its plot details are literally torn off a notepad and thrown up into the air.) But by making the shared future of the audience and actors a compact of uncertainty (at least for the next 90 minutes), he makes you feel the play’s requiem for a lost future in an acutely new way.

In a green gloom of hanging baskets, baize, playing cards, ping pong and even live rabbits, the six actors go in search of their roles, and of lost time. They deliver intensely lit fragments of Chekhov’s speeches. They swap costumes before they’ve finished falling in love. Even if you’re a Chekhov buff, their identities are rarely clear and never stable. What is clear is the way that love, loss and cruelty get obliquely handed on between this domestic group who, with the help of Naomi Dawson’s unchanging design and Jack Knowles’s sensitive live lighting, begin by running wild inside their house and end as tragic statues in their own garden.

There are flaws: lack of story, too much talking on top of each other and too few solos. But it is disarmingly beautiful. At the end the love affair which endures is the one between Chekhov’s play and Goode’s re-animation of it.