The Sunday Times
by John Peter, Cheek by Jowl tour, 6 May 2007

This is a great production, and a thrilling rediscovery of a great and familiar play. Declan Donnellan has lifted from it the bittersweet mist of gentility and melancholy. The Prozorov girls are young, beautiful, playful and sophisticated: not provincial dreamers, but confident Moscow girls from a good family. They laugh a lot and, as the play darkens, the laughter becomes mocking, ironical, angry, desperate, a form of self-defence and relief. The tragic side of the play becomes more deeply painful: they are proud in defeat. The play is in Russian; most of the actors reached maturity in postGorbachev Russia, and their work has a defiant self-assertion. Alexander Feklistov’s middle-aged Vershinin is masterly: sweet-natured and a little awkward, he’s never been handsome, but he has a boyish eagerness that warms the play.