Word: prozorov
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Prozac might have been invented for the Prozorov girls. Stranded in their Russian backwater town, the three sisters of Chekhov's play famously yearn for Moscow, their hopes for love and life all the while fading to gray. Perhaps the most in need of medication is youngest sister Irina, who clocks up dismal hours in the local telegraph office and whose loveless engagement to an army lieutenant ends when he is killed in a duel. With her limpid eyes and languid limbs, Rose Byrne was born to play Irina - as she did in a shrill but memorable Sydney Theatre Company...
...Rumanian Director Andrei Serban that transforms the customarily lugubrious Chekhov portrait of a doomed family into a knock about farce. Actors pout like children on a stage strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters - to return to the gaiety of Moscow - is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with antic energy and force. Serban adroitly manages a welter of themes: aimless ambition, futile romance, grotesque distortions of honor, loneliness in a crowd...
...join the whirl and bustle of life in Moscow, but instead they remain in their small town, their hopes and expectations gradually shrinking to fit the confines of their humdrum existence. Directors typically use elaborate, crowded Victorian set designs to suggest the cramped nature of life in the Prozorov household...
FINE performances in the rest of the cast match the skill in the title roles. Paul Redford is brilliant as Andrey Prozorov, the brother and owner of the estate, whose dream of becoming a university professor is frustrated by a tragic marriage to the bourgeois Natasha (Grace Shohet). Redford skillfully makes the transition from idealistic brother to alienated bitter council member. He epitomizes Andrey's awkwardness in his shuffling, hesitant walk and bursts of speech. And Shohet is deliciously annoying as the pushy, vulgar Natasha, who does nothing but drool--loudly--about her children...
...stage pictures that reinforce their interpretations. His monumental style, however, is least effective at the very beginning, where a touch more continuity and less mannerism might help the actors introduce themselves and the play's refrains. As it is, the opening portrays the prosaic daily life of the Prozorov household and friends with jerkiness. Perhaps Chekhov intended a sense of alienation from the start, but that shouldn't make the actors themselves look uncomfortable on stage, as they do for the first 15 minutes...