Silly Little Country

Family Feud

My sister and I expressed some disagreements as we drove home from watching Soulpepper's Three Sisters last week. I appreciate her comments - we really are of different generations and different sexes, and both those differences play a role.

So she posted on the play yesterday and I have a couple of points I do not agree about!

It is a credit to Chekhov's writing that one finds oneself getting hugely irritated with the characters, and wanting to go up on stage and smack them silly ... It makes it rather difficult to enjoy the play.

Not for me. If anything, I think I know people like this in their fecklessness, and it does not make it difficult for me to watch them develop. But in fact, Chekhov is trickier, one of the sisters just gets smarter and smarter despite herself, and she does not even see herself doing it. This is the wonderful deep wit of Chekhov, who lived in so many worlds. He knew all these people well.

There was also a scene at the end where Megan Follows attempts physical humour, and fails. It just didn't fit with the rest of the play, where she had been dour and forlorn and sleeping or whining, pretty much.

No - in the scene where they come home to wait for the mummers she looks as delighted as one can look in a dalliance, which is pretty delighted. It is the dalliance she is losing as Vershinin leaves, and her only experience of infatuation in her short life. Seemed just right to me and fit my image of Chekhov exactly.

It seems to me that either the entire play has to be a sitcom, or none of it does.

Huh?

And speaking of Follows -- man, did she ever look old and bedraggled. She's only a bit younger than me. She looked positively middle-aged...which I guess we both are.

She looked just dandy to me. I'd have felt almost as proud to be out with her as I did with you and Karen.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 6:13 PM