The Times
by Sam Marlowe at Cambridge Arts Theatre, 30 April 2007

I cannot imagine a more delicate, luminous and emotionally piercing production of Chekhov’s drama than Cheek By Jowl’s. Performed by the company’s Russian ensemble, it is directed by Declan Donnellan with utter precision, while Nick Ormerod’s design, with its tiny symbolic doll’s house and oppressive backdrop of perilously tilting walls and windows, conveys the way in which the Prozorov family home is both prison and sanctuary. And the acting is nothing short of sublime.

Donnellan never neglects the underlying playful girlishness, born of a shared sibling history, that continually bobs to the surface, buoy-like, to keep the sisters afloat even at their most anguished. After the fire of Act III, the trio cling tearfully together as Nelly Uvarova’s huge-eyed Irina grows almost hysterical. When Ekaterina Sibiryakova, as Natasha, appears, it is as if she has stumbled upon a conspiracy, and the sisters’ distress dissolves into illicit giggles. It’s little wonder that Natasha, so entirely excluded and who begins in Sibiryakova’s performance as pretentious and ambitious, yet touchingly gauche, turns as spectacularly nasty as she does here.

The lightness that illuminates the production lies partly in the sisters’ childlike spontaneity and sense of the absurd, and partly in the characters’ observance of social convention. Evgenia Dmitrieva’s lonely, exhausted Olga busies herself, smilingly, with domestic details; and even as Irina Grineva’s Masha wonders how she can continue to bear her “wretched life” she laughs, politely, helplessly. Yet when she meets Alexander Feklistov’s Vershinin, balding, kind and sensitive, part lover, part father-figure, she slyly and appreciatingly flicks her eyes over his body while his back is turned. It’s deliciously naughty.

The characters’ frustrated connections stack up with a mounting sense of dread. Conversations are interrupted by a yawn, a guffaw or a sottise. Andrey pours out his heart to a deaf servant; Solenyi’s unwelcome attentions to Irina culminate in actual sexual assault. Kulygin places a cushion against the belly of Masha and buries his head in it for comfort, as if yearning for the children and happy home she might give him were she not filled with boredom and contempt.

And when Irina is given a spinning top as a name-day present, the entire household wordlessly watches it pointlessly revolve, an economically eloquent image of their futile lives. Heartbreaking simplicity; simply heartbreaking.