Production Notes for Another Three Sisters

Welcome to our theatre in the barns production of Another Three Sisters. Why?

Last summer Agnes, who had just been in The Last Laugh, and Cathy, fellow resident of the Waveney Valley, together with Charlotte by implication, approached me about directing them in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. I believe I mumbled something about it only being possible for the large national companies since a cast of thirteen, compounded by the period costume and samovar budget, would be financially ruinous for any small company like ourselves.  I might also have said that really the three sisters just needed a slap and a railway ticket, but it was the coffee talking, and I apologise now.

So we investigated some modern plays for three women but could find nothing that compared to the original idea and nothing that engaged the East Anglian dimension of our work. I re-read the Chekhov and remembered the wonderful Trevor Nunn production that visited Ipswich in the late seventies. It wasn’t the production that made me think of the late seventies, but I do remember vividly the strong portrayal of Natasha by Susan Tracy and the feeling, in hindsight, that it embodied some of the themes soon to emerge from the eighties . We discussed doing it in modern dress, but there were too many obstacles: the duel (see page x for a brief synopsis of the original), the long emphasis on work as a cure for the sickness of the soul, the seeming imprisonment of the sisters, and, the most difficult, the idea of the army providing the cultural heart of the town. I don’t want to cast our military friends as philistines but the whole culture of time and place had changed beyond recognition. So we started playing around with modern equivalents and every time I thought of the seventies and eighties, things seemed to fit.

However, there was still one major obstacle. How could I present a play that implied the provinces were dead as ditchwater and a virtual tomb for three young women? Or, even worse, that the great city offered the only true nirvana for the young. It seemed to undermine the very essence of what we -  and all other regional theatre -  were about: the opposition to the London-centric view of things. Even though Chekhov himself might be presenting it as an illusion (after all he lived himself in a provincial town most of his life), I have seen metropolitan audiences chuckling at the sisters’ fate and the dreadful people around them. The world had turned since then; socialism and feminism had cast peasants and subservient women to the wind. The play’s ideas as well as its words needed to be translated if we were to set it in modern times.

Heresy? I’m sure there will be some who think I should be permanently on my knees and that even to think of updating Chekhov is to desecrate ground so hallowed that disembowelling would be a light sentence. Well, maybe, except that some local history came bobbing around and offered a possible setting.

 Earlier in the year, I had been taken around Leiston Long Shop Museum by its Director, Stephen Mael, who was also a very enthusiastic supporter of ours. He was convinced there was an Eastern Angles play in the Garretts story.  A world force in the development of production lines and engineering, Garretts had failed to adapt to the later 20^th century and was asset stripped during the early years of Margaret Thatcher. Allied to this story there were several individuals, like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who had become worthy figures in the feminist canon. Frankly, I didn’t need much convincing but I couldn’t see how to do it, or rather I couldn’t see how to make it different from all the other shows we had created about industries that had closed in the modern world.  And then these two projects started to merge, largely because as soon as I started to think what kind of town in East Anglia would compare to the sisters’ supposed backwater, Leiston sprang to mind and precisely because of the closure of the great industry there. It seemed a direct parallel to the army leaving in Chekhov. Two other of its landmarks, Sizewell B and Summerhill, also offered interesting parallels, and so we were on our way.

It was only afterwards, partly as a result of a misunderstanding with Stephen Mael at Leiston, that I realised the feminist icons were indeed sisters and we had another three sisters to provide an extraordinary resonance to our now modern trio.

The eagle-eyed will spot some possible re-dating of events, like the merging of 1980 and 1981 into one year, but this isn’t a play about the history, it’s about people, and I plead a dramatic licence that I hope isn’t overindulged.

Many thanks to Stephen and Julia Mael, who have done everything it is possible to do, including moving three steam engines, to make this happen; to Lady Jocelyn Magnus for allowing us to rehearse in her hall. Tithe barns do require lots of help with permissions and many others along the way have had to go the extra mile, often with power leads, to make these shows possible.

Ivan Cutting

Artistic Director