THREE SISTERS – BEYOND TIME

THREE SISTERS – BEYOND TIME

Modern retelling Chekhov’s Three Sisters about difficult way to purify and attempt of breaking with the past. Entrapment, confrontation with ghosts of the past and timeless battle with patriarchy induce something unexpected…Titular sisters in original play are stuck in a provincial town and above all want to go to Moscow. In Three Sisters – Beyond Time the plot of this stuckness is even clearer mostly because of main staging idea. There are no physical male characters in the show – we can only hear their voices what in consequence leads to psychological depth. Performance becomes a metaphor of current reality where due to remote working we are stuck in houses with family with whom we sometimes get along poorly. Like three sisters we are sometimes in two minds, recollecting past or imagining the future conversations with “absent” people. Are these conversations real or are they just memories of what happened a long time ago? Maybe they are peculiar spiritual séances with ghost of the past or only a trick of our minds about conversations we would like to have? Three sisters’ entrapment and compulsion of constant confrontation with ghosts of absent men induces something unexpected. Disputes, contrasting characters and different attitudes to life cause conflicts between sisters but at the same time they support each other in a difficult way to purify and break with the past. But will this purification and breaking with the past actually come?

In terms of costumes and set up there’s been used the Steampunk stylisation. This subculture takes place in an alternate reality during a Victorian era and this alternativeness relates to the main idea of Chekhov’s Three Sisters adaptation. Moreover, nineteenth century inspired Steampunk fashion relates very well to the classic aspects of characters in original text but at the same time lets us modernise them for the purpose of the Three Sisters – Beyond Time show. It is said that Steampunk is set in a past that never happened and a future that will never be. This statement resonates with the world created in the performance.

Premiere: 16^th February 2022, Augustine United Church, Edinburgh, Scotland

*In 2024 roku, Polish version of the show was presented during international festival #PolacyPolkiRobiąTeatr in Druga Strefa Theatre, Warsaw, Poland