Chekhov's Three Sisters

A Study Guide

Michael Pennington

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788502054
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Regia e produzione teatrale

The Nick Hern Books Page to Stage series – highly accessible guides to the world's best-known plays, written by established theatre professionals to show how the plays come to life on the stage.

Actor Michael Pennington conducts us scene by scene through the action of Chekhov's Three Sisters, analysing moment by moment what is actually said and done, and how the staging of these moments affects our understanding of them.

Also included in this volume: a concise introduction to Chekhov and the historical background of the play; discussions of the play's themes and of Chekhov's playwriting technique; and individual studies of each of the play's characters.

Ideal for anyone studying, teaching or performing Three Sisters, as well as anyone interested in how the play works on stage.

Act Four

The fourth act of Three Sisters, like the third, starts with a surprise. More time has passed, though it is not at first clear how much. During the course of the act Tuzenbakh will say that he has loved Irina for five years, and he certainly did at the start of the action, so the overall span cannot be longer than that. At times like this, the play feels like an animated album of snapshots taken across a long period. Apart from the arrival of Bobik, the jump between Act One and Two was marked by an obvious change in Andrei; between Act Two and Three Sophie had been born; now, in Act Four, Kulygin has shaved off his moustache. Chebutykin is cheerful again, Second Lieutenants Fedotik and Rodé are in full parade uniforms, and for the first time we are in the open air.

Fedotik, who seems to have the knack of calling a spade a spade but also of remaining cheerful in the face of disaster, gives a clue as to what is happening:

TUZENBAKH: . . . Goodbye, my dear friend!

IRINA: Au revoir!

FEDOTIK: No, not au revoir, it’s goodbye, I’m afraid – we’ll never see each other again.

So the brigade is leaving today; it cannot be so very long after Act Three, when this was predicted. It transpires, as a result of an untypical joke from Kulygin about one of the officers marrying a Polish wife, that Poland is, as Vershinin half-expected, its destination. However Chebutykin is still comfortably installed in the house because, for no evident reason, he is following a day later. The long night of the fire forgotten along with any other setbacks during the stay, the company is marking the departure with champagne and photographs on the porch. Even Kulygin, who has ample reason for wanting the soldiers gone, is paradoxically moved by the finality of it all:

Look at this, I’m crying too!

In fact, he may weep more frequently these days.

Much as Irina may try to soften the blow:

We’ll meet again some day.

– the remorseless Fedotik will have no false comfort:

What, in ten or fifteen years, say? We’ll barely recognise each other by then, we’ll shake hands very coldly . . .

This Russian dismay at the hugeness of a country in which friends can be easily lost without recovery is being dealt with in two different ways: hope against hope (typically enough) from Irina, and truth-telling from a minor character. Fedotik is matched in ruthlessness by Rodé, who ignores Tuzenbakh’s fond hope that they will all write to each other, preferring to say a last goodbye to the unique atmospherics, the household gods you might say, of the place:

Coo-eee! Coo-eee!

A pause.

Farewell, echo!

Some more facts are expressed, important for the audience to hear clearly: the soldiers will be gone within an hour; Soliony, alone of the unit, is travelling by river, the rest as foot soldiers. All six battery divisions in the town will be gone by tomorrow. The descending silence will be deep indeed, and we realise that, beyond the Prozorovs’, all this time there were other households where the military were entertained, no doubt with their own dramas.

All that is left is to say goodbye to Masha, who is in the depths of the garden; and also for Fedotik to give one final little gift, not to Irina this time, but unexpectedly to Kulygin:

This is for you, a keepsake . . . a notebook and a pencil.

It may be that he knows it is the schoolteacher who might be in need of comfort. Chebutykin is overlooked, and perhaps has done all he can to be so:

CHEBUTYKIN: They forgot to say goodbye to me.

IRINA: And what about you?

CHEBUTYKIN: I forgot as well.

This is nonsense talk – he could hardly have forgotten as he was sitting there watching, he just didn’t trouble himself. One of his objects these days seems to be to keep a low profile. In a year’s time, though, when he next comes to see the Prozorovs, retired and on his army pension, he promises to:

. . . turn over a new leaf . . . I’ll be so quiet, and well . . . well-behaved, and respectable . . .

Perhaps no one has quite forgotten his disgrace in Act Three; certainly Irina, who watched him drop her mother’s clock, has a firm point of view:

You really ought to turn over a new leaf, my dear. You really should try.

The doctor barely acknowledges this, but takes characteristic refuge behind a newspaper, humming a little tune:

Ta-ra-ra boom-dee-ay, ta-ra-ra boom-dee-ay . . .

This is, in its Russian version, the chorus of an American music-hall song recently arrived in Europe – the accompanying verses varied from country to country, but always had a distinctly sexual overtone. It had also been adopted as a military marching tune. So every time Chebutykin uses it in this act, it is a reminder of the soldier’s life, with a certain coarseness. It is enough for Kulygin to protest at now; recovered from the recent farewells, he doubts whether turning over a new leaf would ever be an option for the old man:

You’re incorrigible, Doctor. Quite incorrigible!

This brings him enough into focus for Irina and Chebutykin to make fun of his changed appearance:

IRINA: Fyodor’s shaved off his moustaches. I can’t look at him . . .

CHEBUTYKIN: I wish I could say what your phizzog looks like now, but I can’t.

It’s difficult to know why his being clean-shaven would cause such a stir, but the cause of it is typical:

It’s the done thing nowadays . . . Our headmaster’s shaved off his whiskers, and since I’ve been made deputy, I’ve shaved mine off too.

He will put up with anything, it seems, to be in line with his superior:

Nobody likes it, but I don’t care. I’m happy. With or without whiskers, I’m a happy man.

This is a patent untruth: what he means is that whiskers are the least of his troubles.

Masha was briefly seen in the distance earlier; now Andrei takes her place at the bottom of the garden, wheeling Sophie in her pram. As he does so, a new story starts up, but it has nothing to do with him – in this way Chekhov creates the illusion of continuous, varied life behind a changing main focus. This focus is now on Irina, worried that something happened ‘yesterday, on the boulevard’, apparently involving Soliony and Tuzenbakh. She expects Chebutykin to know about it, but he is keeping quiet, barricaded behind his newspaper and his nonchalant attitude:

What’s it matter anyway?

Tuzenbakh himself would prefer the subject dropped, just as Kulygin wants to keep it going:

TUZENBAKH: Oh, stop, that’s enough. Honestly! (Waves his hand dismissively and goes into the house.)

But Kulygin has no such scruples about telling Irina the bad news. It seems that Soliony and Tuzenbakh met and quarrelled, Soliony picking on the Baron as usual, but this time the normally patient Tuzenbakh couldn’t refrain from returning the insult. The result was as predictable as clockwork – a duel. Kulygin also knows that one of their problems is that Soliony has fallen for Irina – a thing he is happy to talk about openly, since he can well understand the feeling: she is, after all, of the same blood as his beloved Masha. His inability to keep a secret is matched by his tendency to keep returning to the subject of himself: when Chebutykin, only slightly less of a gossip, interrupts to dismiss the whole story as ‘bunkum’, Kulygin can’t help telling a little school story:

I heard about a teacher in a seminary once, who wrote ‘bunkum’ on a student’s essay, and he thought it was a Latin word! (Laughs.)

It is only a momentary distraction, the memory of it the briefest of pleasures. Returning to his theme, Kulygin pays tribute to Irina – ‘a very pretty girl’ – but is careful to praise Masha in the same breath, so that she will seem in no way inferior:

And she’s so like Masha, always deep in thought. You’ve a gentler nature, though, Irina. Of course, Masha has a very nice nature too. Yes, I do love Masha.

This loyalty under strain is pathetic and quite touching: Kulygin knows he has married the wrong woman. He has already said he might have preferred Olga, and now Masha’s abrasively unpredictable nature is suiting him less that Irina’s might have done. It is a brilliant piece of writing: in a few indirect words, with their careful repetitive rhythm, Chekhov has left us in no doubt of the speaker’s deep unhappiness. Kulygin knows Vershinin is leaving today; Masha is not beside him but on her own somewhere; he surely knows of the relationship, and how she must be feeling at this moment of goodbye. His dogged determination not to criticise a wife everyone now senses to be unfaithful admits his huge defeat but also gives him a certain dignity: the actor should find it easy to keep our guarded sympathy alive.

All the normality is beginning to feel forced: something is being evaded, some story lurking, preoccupying everyone. For one thing, Irina is jumpy about all the secrecy. A cry is heard from the depths of the garden. It is only the sound that Rodé used to test the echo:

Coo-eee! Coo-eee!

– but for the first time it sounds other than a merry greeting. (In Russian it is ‘Ay! Gop-gop!’, perhaps a stranger sound than in English.) It significantly startles Irina:

Everything seems to frighten me today.

As with Kulygin a moment ago, Chekhov is revealing her state of mind in the most economical way. What, apart from further insults between Soliony and her fiancé, is Irina nervous about? Could it be what she now describes as her new life, which, considering how much she and Tuzenbakh have discussed it, she surely welcomes? She is packed and ready to leave home, she is to be married tomorrow; the same afternoon they will leave for the brickworks, where presumably he is to work (whether clerically or physically is never quite clear), and the next day she will start a life of teaching. Tuzenbakh will have got exactly what he asked for, though we can only guess how this sensitive and educated man, in his civilian suit, will fare at work. Irina’s new life sounds more promising: passing her teaching exam must have given confidence to someone in such despair of her intellect that she once couldn’t remember the Italian for ‘window’:

You know, when I passed the exam to be a teacher, I actually cried for joy, I was so happy . . .

But now she is frightened. There is a pause, then:

The cart’ll be here soon for my things.

As to her becoming a teacher, what is Kulygin’s attitude to such an idealistic novice joining his profession? Not altogether welcoming, but certainly perceptive:

Well, that’s as may be, but it somehow doesn’t seem serious. A lot of ideas, yes, but not much serious thought.

We would probably have to agree with that. But today, his own anxiety has made him good-natured:

Still, I wish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• The Page to Stage Series
• From Page to Stage
• Anton Chekhov
• Writing Three Sisters
• Themes
• Chekhov’s Technique
• Act One
• Act Two
• Act Three
• Act Four
• The Characters
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information