Last Updated on August 21, 2025
Chekhov sets the Globe alight
4.5 out of 5.0 starsA new production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters somehow shoehorns a whole world onto one small candlelit stage. This is the first time a Chekhov play has been performed at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse might just be the perfect fit for this intense journey back to provincial Russia circa 1900.
Directed by Caroline Steinbeis, Three Sisters makes for a mesmerising night at the theatre that throws light on the human condition. It combines uniformly excellent acting and an intelligent, fresh translation by playwright and Russian speaker Rory Mullarkey.
The oldest of the three sisters of the title is sensible, hardworking schoolteacher, Olga, already feeling old at 28, sensitively played Oliver Award-winner Michelle Terry (also the current artistic director of the Globe). In the middle is Masha, who married a teacher she thought clever when she was 18, now five years on she knows that he is not. In the very watchable Shannon Tarbet’s hands, Masha is a woman whose fragile beauty belies an inner furnace of fierceness and anger. The youngest is Irina (performed with youthful energy by Ruby Thompson). She of all the play’s characters is the most obsessed by returning to Moscow with all its glittering promises. We watch her over the years turn from romantic to realist.
With each of Three Sisters’ four acts, we land in the same place but at a different point in time over a period of four or five years. This allows us to witness changes in attitudes, aspirations, hopes, maturity, acceptance or not depending on the character in question.
The meaning of suffering, dread and hope, realism and dreams, loneliness and love all vie for position in the minds of Chekhov’s characters. This is a talky play, with riffs on the nature of work, love and loss. The same themes repeat across the four visits to the Prozorov household in a dull provincial town of 100,000 people, 15 miles from the nearest station and a world away from Moscow. Only the arrival of soldiers in town enlivens the dull existence of the family. The siblings have been educated well beyond their ability to find the local townsfolk interesting.
Russia’s capital looms large in the imaginations of the sisters and their brother Andrei (Stuart Thompson). Their eleven years in this unnamed town have been tolerated only with a view of escape to a more meaningful life in Moscow. Irina believes that only there will she find someone worthy of falling in love with, while Andrei aspires to a professorship at the university. Over the course of the play, their reluctance to embrace change intervenes. Dreams begin to fade.
Three Sisters is packed with three-dimensional characters. Peter Wight shines as doctor and family friend Chebutykin as he disintegrates into alcoholism and starts to question the reality of everything around him. Natalie Klamar as Andrei’s ill-matched wife conjures up a brewing combination of stupidity, self-interest and power. Paul Ready is a good match too for the “Lovesick Major”, whose philosophising captures the heart of Masha.
I’ve marvelled before at the atmosphere evoked by the use of candlelight in this small theatre but this combination of light and play is the best yet by the Globe’s candlelight designer Anna Watson. The first three acts are all set inside the family house (electricity did not reach most Russian homes until the 1920s), while the fourth takes us outside and into a whole new lightscape.
Rory Mullarkey keeps his version of Three Sisters firmly in Russia at the turn of the last century, keeping the play’s specificities of time and place. He allows Chekhov’s universal themes to speak to us loud and clear right now without trying to reinvent the theatrical wheel. In this production, Three Sisters still feels frighteningly modern. More Chekhov at the Globe, please.
Three Sisters is playing at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe until 19 April 2025
21 New Globe Walk, London SE1 9DT
Cymbeline is also currently showing at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, or for more Shakespeare, try Much Ado About Nothing, currently showing at the Theatre Royal London West End
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