Three Sisters (Paperback, New edition)

Three Sisters, set in a rural backwater of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, is a play about dreams, hope, work and love. The sisters of the title dream of returning to Moscow, where their lives, they are certain, will be happier; in the meantime, the eldest and youngest, Olga and Irina, seek solace in work and the middle sister, Masha, married to the local schoolmaster, embarks on a hopeless but passionate affair with Vershinin, commander of the local army battery. Years pass, and their brother Andrei's wife, Natasha, slowly but inexorably ousts Olga and Irina from their family home as well as draining all life and hope from Andrei himself. At the end, rootless and loveless, the sisters face a bleak future with only one certainty: we cannot understand life, we must just endure it. Christopher Hampton's version of Chekhov's classic tragicomedy captures both the light, comic naturalism of its dialogue and the poetic melancholy of its atmosphere, a firm sense of the play's period balancing perfectly with a very modern clarity and economy of expression. It premi red at the Playhouse Theatre in 2003 with Kristin Scott-Thomas, Robert Bathurst, James Fleet and Eric Sykes among a distinguished cast.