Three Sisters – Footnotes
These Footnotes accompany our episode on Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and include observations on the many who are disappointed in love; the two Mashas in Three Sisters and The Seagull; the hapless but admirable character of Tuzenbach; and the recurring symbol of migrating birds.
Not listened to the episode yet? You’ll find it here.
Love and misery
Many of the characters in Three Sisters are melodramatically miserable, and one of the common reasons for their unhappiness is that everyone seems to be disappointed in love. It is worth reciting all the specific mismatches that are at play between them:
- Tuzenbach, Solyony and Fedotik all love Irina, but she loves none of them.
- Kulygin loves his wife Masha, but she doesn’t love him.
- Masha falls in love with Vershinin, who is also married. He clearly doesn’t love his wife, but he will never leave her for Masha.
- Olga wishes she had someone who loved her. Kulygin hardly helps by telling her that “if it wasn’t for Masha, I would’ve married you”. At one point Olga bemoans the strains of working and imagines being able to stay at home if she were married, saying plaintively, “I’d love my husband”. The line reveals the depth of her longing and her missed chance to do just that.
- Andrei loved Natasha until he married her, and now doesn’t. In fact, he is extraordinarily scathing about her to Chebutykin:
“She’s honest, decent, well, kind, but there’s something inside her which keeps shrinking her down to this small, blind, angry little animal. At any rate she is not a human being…I love Natasha, I do, but sometimes she seems so bewilderingly banal, that I lose sight, I don’t understand why I love her, or at least why I used to love her.” To which Chebutykin rather amusingly tells him bluntly that he should simply walk out, and keep walking, which he patently will never do. - And Natasha – did she love Andrei before they married? Either way, she doesn’t now and is carrying on an affair with Protopopov, which is even more humiliating for Andrei, given that he is his boss on the district council.
- Finally, Chebutykin was hopelessly in love with the sisters’ mother. We don’t know what transpired between them, but he exudes a sorrow about it, either because it was never allowed to flourish or because she has now passed, or both.
Having been disappointed in love, Olga and Irina throw themselves into work as an act of abnegation, just as do the heartbroken Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya, and Nina in The Seagull. While all this misplaced love can seem like comic folly in some ways, it is invariably deeply felt, and Chekhov is always empathetic.
Ruby Thompson as Irina and Michelle Terry as Olga
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe
February 2025
Photo by Johan Persson
Stuart Thompson as Andrei and Natalie Klamar as Natasha
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe
February 2025
Photo by Johan Persson
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, February 2025
Photo by Johan Persson
Two Mashas
In the first act of Three Sisters Masha is melodramatically miserable. She deliberately sits on the sidelines, and quotes a refrain from a sad song, ““On the curved seashore a green oak tree/ A golden chain on the oak tree there”. The poem has the sound of a fairy tale, and evokes a dream-like image of escape. Of course she is desperate to escape her unhappy marriage, spending as much time as she can staying away from her husband’s company. Her disdain for Kulygin is made all the worse by his desperate fawning over her. Her misery at being stuck with the boredom of his company, and his life of underachievement is understandable. We certainly feel for her attending the dull party at the headmaster’s, for example, to fulfil her duty as the supportive wife.
Having seen a production of The Seagull recently, I was struck by the similarity between the characters who share the name of Masha in these two plays. Both are ostentatiously unhappy, advertising their melancholy by dressing completely in black. Masha in The Seagull says that she is in mourning for her life, and as Three Sisters opens, Masha may be in mourning for her father, but it also feels appropriate for her general air of misery. They are both also desperately loved by their husbands, whom they don’t love back, and therefore spend time avoiding. In fact the husbands, Medvedenko and Kulygin are both school teachers, and described in strikingly similar terms. Masha says of Medvedenko, “My schoolteacher isn’t very clever, but he’s a kind man”; and one hears an echo of that when Irina describes Kulygin as “the kindest man in the world, but he isn’t the cleverest.” In The Seagull Masha is hopelessly in love with Konstantin, but she has to give that up as a lost cause and settles for Medvedenko. At least initially her melancholy feels lighter and funnier in Chekhov’s rendering, whereas although Masha Kulygin finds temporary refuge in her affair with Vershinin, her pain always feels sharper and angrier.
Tuzenbach
Initially we might look on the baron Tuzenbach’s persistent pursuit of Irina as somewhat pathetic – she clearly does not reciprocate his feelings and shows little sign of succumbing. He is like a pet dog, loving her no matter how indifferently she treats him.
His constant sermonizing about work can also come across as hollow, coming from a man with such a privileged background who admits that he has “never worked a day in his life”. However, I think that we come to respect him. He exudes a dogged optimism and integrity, and he does make good on his vow to work, resigning his commission and taking a job in the brick factory, partly in order to help his cause of winning and supporting Irina. He is in fact enacting his prediction that “in something like twenty-five, thirty years, every single person will be working”, which is perhaps a reflection of the emerging industrialisation in Russia at the time.
It is hard not be touched by his love for Irina, when he says things like, “every single day I’ll come to the telegraph office and I’ll keep walking you home, for ten years, twenty years, until you drive me away…”, or “Don’t go…just let me be near you for a bit…We have so many years ahead of us, a long, long line of days filled with my love for you.” Which is all the more poignant for the irony that in the end there were no more days ahead of them.
We noted in the podcast that Tuzenbach’s death occurs offstage, and we commented on how the distance created from the act of his killing leaves the three sisters centre stage, focussing on their own concerns about their future. Apparently, Chekhov wrote a draft of the play in which Tuzenbach’s body is carried across the stage, but its absence is perhaps more powerful, and an appropriate conclusion for this admirable but inevitably peripheral character.
Ruby Thompson as Irina
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, February 2025
Photo by Johan Persson.
Migrating birds
We talked in the podcast about the fact that there are seldom any neat answers to the questions that Chekhov and his characters raise about their lives. Certainly, there is no structural or moral resolution in the ending of this play. The sisters are not going to Moscow, nor will most of the other characters find answers to their dreams of happiness.
Rory wrote in a note in the published version of his text that the “the more Chekhov learned, the less he knew”. By which he meant that he came to understand with humility that we cannot possibly fathom the endlessly variable spectrum of human behaviour – that there are no simple morals or meanings to be drawn. As Rory remarked repeatedly in our conversation, there are so many contradictory motifs in the play, including within the characters themselves. There is often little accord between them, and what they say, whether they listen to each other or not. Their self-conscious search for meaning in their lives is necessary, but futile.
There is a lovely metaphor suggested by several references made in the play to the birds migrating in the sky, who are able to fly without apparent thought, while these humans with conscious agency are unable to act purposefully, to migrate to Moscow for example. The image is introduced by Tuzenbach who comments that the cranes that fly south, “fly and …fly, and any kind of meaning, great or small never enters their heads, they just fly without knowing what for”. Chebutykin picks up on the metaphor, saying that he is a bird that is too old to fly south now, but he wishes Irina and Tuzenbach well before they fly off to their new life, which sadly they fail to do. As Masha walks out into the trees on the day the army marches off in formation to pastures new, she too remarks on the departing birds, wishing she were as free to do so.
For all of them, nature’s purpose is obscure, though they wish that it might provide some clue. If they only knew. In her final lines in the play, Olga expresses a desire to know a reason for their existence and suffering. Although she says it with yearning and determination, I think we understand that her, and our, desire to know will never be answered. Chekhov famously said in a letter to his wife, “You ask me what the meaning of life is. You might just as well ask the meaning of a carrot. A carrot is a carrot.”
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Published 24th August
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
0 Comments