Check out Chekhov’s three sassy sisters
Three Sisters (NT at Home) Verdict: Wonderful women ★★★★✩
Stevie Smith: Black March (deadpoets.live) Verdict: Audio-visual delight ★★★★✩
BACK in the day, brimming with idealism at university, I tried to join the Feminist Society. The woman at the freshers’ fair desk objected on the grounds that I was clearly a man — only to be overheard and berated by another woman for discrimination.
History repeated itself this week when I went in search of plays to celebrate International Women’s Day, along with Mother’s Day this weekend. A 20-minute monologue at the Old Vic (Putting A Face On) warned that ‘the biggest red flag is a man telling you he’s a feminist’. And there was me thinking it was a man telling you he’s Harvey Weinstein.
This time it was my wife who rescued me from a tight spot, and a dismally familiar tale of a woman who suspects she’s being ‘gaslighted’ (psychologically controlled) by her husband. ‘What about Three Sisters on NT at Home?’ she suggested.
What indeed? I’d been looking for an excuse to revisit Inua Ellams’s epic reworking of Anton Chekhov’s Russian masterpiece from 1900, which Ellams has reset in Nigeria’s Biafran war of the late 1960s.
Here are three fabulous, real, complex, paradoxical, driven, funny women who are well worth your time and money. It’s a long haul at nearly three hours but Nadia Fall’s production hums with passion, politics and humour.
The story starts as a garrison of soldiers are billeted in a region of provincial Nigeria inhabited by the Igbo tribe — instead of
Chekhov’s provincial Russia. The setting is the verandah of the handsome family home where youngest sister Udo (Racheal Ofori) celebrates her birthday and looks forward to a bright new future filled with hope.
Sarah Niles, as oldest sister Lolo, is a tough-minded teacher, dismayed by the emerging violence of war — and jealous of middle sister Nne Chukwu, who has been married off to the man who used to be her own childhood sweetheart. And as that middle sister, Natalie Simpson yearns not for her husband but for a troubled, handsome soldier (Ken Nwosu) who is fighting for Biafran independence.
Thanks to Katrina Lindsay’s impressive 1960s set, it’s easy on the eye. But it is the vividly drawn female characters, with their hunger to live — for better or worse — who will stay with you.
While you are on the NT at Home site, two other titles with great roles for women have just been released. Benedict Andrews’s take on Tennessee Williams’s family meltdown drama Cat On A Hot Tin Roof features Sienna Miller as the feral Maggie. And Roger Michell’s production of Consent, Nina Raine’s drama about barristers and questions of sexual agreement, stars Anna Maxwell Martin as a new mum whose life, and marriage, is not as perfect as it seems. n A MUCH quieter portrait of a very different woman features Juliet Stevenson in Oliver Rowse and James Lever’s docu-drama about the poet, novelist and illustrator Stevie Smith.
Performed and filmed in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker studio at Shakespeare’s Globe, it’s a haunting account of Smith’s life told through her poetry, letters and drawings.
Born in Hull in 1902, she lived a reclusive life in the suburbs of Palmers Green, North London. Her most famous poem, Not Waving But Drowning, gave us the phrase that has become an everyday idiom; and the poet Philip Larkin said her work spoke with ‘the authority of sadness’.
Smith described herself as ‘a couple of sherries below par most of the time’. Even so, she managed an affair with George Orwell and commanded the admiration of other poets including Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney.
She had a lifelong fascination with fairy tales, too, and the joy of her writing lies in the simplicity of nursery rhyme language used to grapple with the biggest questions — about God, death and more.
Stevenson gives a peculiarly stern yet tender performance as a woman described as ‘half nun, half schoolgirl’. She is enthroned in a sturdy armchair while, beside her, commentary (some of it excitable) is offered by mophaired literary pundit James Lever. What I loved most about Smith, though, was her cartoons: childlike sketches that are innocent yet ominous. And these are cut in throughout, creating an audiovisual delight.
Three Sisters from national theatre.org.uk/ntathome; £9.98 monthly subscription/£5.99 rent. Stevie Smith: Black March, free to view at deadpoets.live until April 5.