The Independent
by Paul Taylor at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, 4 May 2007

Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, the artistic directors of Cheek By Jowl, are in the unusual position of being considered national treasures in two countries - their native England and their adoptive Russia. The company's visiting productions had so impressed Moscow and St Petersburg that in 1999 the Theatre Federation took the unprecedented step of inviting them to form a Russian counterpart to Cheek By Jowl. This luminous version of Three Sisters, brilliantly performed by that ensemble, constitutes a complete explanation of why the Russians have taken Donnellan and Ormerod to their hearts.

I have never seen a production of the play that moved with such expressive fluency or that communicated its volatile, contradictory moods with a more piercing precision. We first see the three sisters and their brother Andrei grouped as if for a family portrait - civilised, harmonious and in a pose that, while it would have gratified their father, the General, is simply unsustainable since his death, which has left them stranded as over-educated, self-doubting misfits in this remote, crashingly dull provincial town.

The staging gives itself a marvellous freedom of manoeuvre by eschewing fussy realism. There's a doll's-house, a wind-up gramophone, a scattering of chairs and tables: changes of setting are swiftly evoked by arranging these items in various configurations. In the second scene, where a visit from the mummers is awaited, the tables become a kind of inner stage with candles as footlights and thus can act as a platform for the philosophising bout between Vershinin and Tuzenbach.

Throughout, you get a strong sense of people striving to rouse themselves from depression. True to Chekhov, the production underlines how tragic feeling can erupt in desperate laughter and playfulness. You see this in a splendidly handled sequence in the scene after the fire. On her usual fault-finding rounds of the house, the usurping sister-in-law Natasha (Ekaterina Sibiryakova) crosses the stage with a candle, too absorbed to acknowledge the sisters. A comment by Masha that "the way she goes about you'd think that it was she who started the fire" reduces the trio to convulsions of mirth. Their contentious sibling intimacy, the humour that can bubble up even in extremis because of long family history, and their snooty conspiratorial bond against the vulgar, awkward Natasha: all of this is beautifully revealed.

Nelly Uvarova is the most haunting Irina that I've encountered. She projects to perfection the confused, fearful yearning of a girl who, at 24, feels that the capacity to love has become imprisoned within. Evgenia Dmitrieva is an unusually attractive Olga - lonely yet stoic, fanning herself with a handkerchief as if trying to whisk away the unwelcome news of Masha's adulterous passion but matter-of-factly throwing a glass of water over Irina when the latter succumbs to hysterics. You learn volumes about the sad, hopeless marriage of Irina Grineva's Masha and the schoolteacher Kulygin here when he beseechingly plumps a pillow against her womb and lays his head on it like a little boy anxious to be comforted. Not that you feel that their union would have been any happier had she given him children.

It's never occurred to me before to speculate about what happens to Bobik, the sisters' sickly and much cosseted baby nephew. But here, because of the Russian cast, I fell to wondering how he fared in that country's future. Were his mother's genes dominant or those of his father? Did he become a Soviet apparatchik or was he purged?