This review was written for artsHub.
First performed in
1901, Chekhov’s
Three Sisters is a play about love,
the question (and delusion) of love, and the notion of happiness and/or
contentedness. Perhaps not as bleak as Ivanov,
or as elegantly poignant as The
Seagull, Three Sisters is
still undeniably Chekhovian in its depiction of a group of people caught up in
their foibles and their lives, with much philosophising and talk of fate and
the future that lies ahead of them. The three Pozorov sisters – Olga, Masha,
and Irina – are stuck in a provincial town hundreds of miles from Moscow, and one day dream
of returning to their beloved city; fate, however, has other ideas, and life
overtakes them, further anchoring them to the small town. In one sense, it is a
comedy in the Chekhovian sense, but at the same time it is very much a drama.
This production at the Genesian
Theatre is undeniably a comedy, but not as Chekhov ever intended it.
Billed in the
season book as a “kind of Don Quixote for the female comic,” Zoë Coombs Marr’s Is This Thing On?
is the story of one woman’s journey as a stand-up comedian. As we follow her
career from her awkward first gig to her mid-career crisis and her eventual
comeback some years later, not only do we see a character and person grow, but
we also see Coombs
Marr’s skills as a writer become apparent, because Is This Thing On? is essentially five overlapping and intersecting
comedy routines, performed by five different actors, in five different moments
in time.
Belvoir’s presentation of Adena Jacobs’
theatrical reimaging of Persona is a hard
pill to swallow. First performed by Fraught Outfit in Melbourne in 2012 to
strong critical reviews, it takes Bergman’s 1966 film of the same name, and
uses Bergman’s dialogue but reconceives it for the stage. Similar to Simon
Stone’s staging of Bergman’s Face to Face
for Sydney Theatre Company last year, Persona
seems to be more distant and removed than it needs to be, and seems to occur in
some kind of unengaging vacuum rather than the “consummate theatrical
close-up ” Belvoir advertises in their season brochure.
