John Byrne hates exposition. In his own writing in now classic works such as The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti, his characters talk in baroque flourishes of pop cultural patois that ricochet between them. In his new version of Chekhov play, Three Sisters, however, which opens next week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow before embarking on a national tour, tackling such rich but exposition-laden source material hasn't been easy.
“I love Chekhov,” Byrne says over a Cappuccino in Edinburgh's Filmhouse
cafe, “but you can only capture about a third of it, because it's Russian. I thought The Seagull particularly was all exposition, all that 'I dress in black because of my father's death' sort of thing, which we're so unused to, characters describing themselves and saying what's happening to them. So I wouldn't normally like that, but all life is in Chekhov's plays.
“I chose an old literal translation of Three Sisters by some woman I didnae know at all. It wasnae a version. It was just a straightforward translation into English, so it was very dull, with all the characters talking about themselves and describing their feelings and whatever else right at the start. We cannae sit through that, because we're not Russian.
“You hope to capture something of the atmosphere of Chekhov when you do a version of it, but you cannae really hope to get it all. You'd be better watching a Russian company, even though you couldnae understand every word, or any word, but you'd get the whole tone of the thing. It's not just a play. The whole of Russia from that period is there, which he captured so wonderfully well.
“Chekhov's characters expose the facts that they're in love with people. Life, love and death, and relationships with their vast country, that's what his plays are about. It's geographical in that way as well, because normally if you're away from the centre, you're away from everything, and we don't have those vast spaces at all. We're a tiny country. Although we've got space in Scotland, it's no' vast tracks of land that you'd have to trek across for years to get somewhere else. So there had to be a lot of cutting, otherwise people would just fall asleep. People have to be entertained as well.”
In Byrne's Three Sisters, rather than yearning for Moscow in turn of the century rural Russia, the siblings are living beside Dunoon naval base in the 1960s just as their much longed for London has started to swing.
“They're desperate to get back there and get back to all the things they're missing,” says Byrne. “I set it in Dunoon because I recently went back to there for the first time in forty years, and U.S. troops had been there at the submarine base, which was very helpful. In the play the father is a London guy who's been posted there as a Commodore of a whole fleet of sub-marines.”
Three Sisters is Byrne's third Chekhov adaptation to be produced following his versions of The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya, with the latter rewritten as Uncle Varick. Byrne has also penned a new take on
The Seagull which has yet to find a home. Despite staying faithful to
the originals,each one is pulsed with Byrne's unique linguistic stamp.
“They're written in my version of English,” Byrne says, “which is very artificial, very invented, lyrical and ornamental. If you see a Chekhov just translated into ordinary English it can be pretty dull, but I love the artifice of all these invented phrases that hide things.”
Beyond Three Sisters, in October the Tron and the Glasgay! festival will present a revival of Colquhoun & MacBryde, Byrne's 1992 play about Scottish artists, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. Looking further ahead, in February 2015 the Citizens Theatre will be mounting a major revival of The Slab Boys. This production will see Byrne reunited with David Hayman, the Citz stalwart who directed the very first production of the play at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1978. There is also an un-named fourth project on the go, which, in a rare moment of discretion, Byrne can't talk about yet.
In the meantime, Three Sisters will feature a trio of red-haired actresses playing the title roles. With the elder sisters played by Muireann Kelly and Sally Reid, the youngest will see Jessica Hardwick, step up for her first major stage role since appearing in the Citizens productions of Crime and Punishment and Miss Julie. It was Hardwick's appearance in those shows that led to her winning the inaugural Billy award. The award was founded by Byrne to highlight the achievements of young performers, and named in honour of the late Billy McColl, who blazed a trail playing Phil McCann in Hayman's original production of The Slab Boys.
“Billy was a wonderful actor,” says Byrne, “and Jessica's wonderful as
well. All the cast are.”
For all his reimaginings of Chekhov, Byrne has discovered a common thread running through them all.
“That we're all the same,” he says. “We're all human beings, and we all
have the same emotions. We don't have any smaller emotions in Scotland than people do in Russia. It's been tricky transposing the play to a smaller place, because it becomes a different creature, but the emotions that people have are still the same wherever you set it.”
Three Sisters, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, October 1-18; Colquhoun & MacBryde, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, October 29-November 8; The Slab Boys,
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, February 12-March 7 2015.
www.tron.co.uk
www.citz.co.uk
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The Three Sisters
Anton Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters in 1900, inspired in part by the three Bronte sisters, and the play was first produced in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre. It was directed by Constantin Stanislavsky, who also played Vershinin.
In 1936, John Gielgud directed an English translation of the play in a production that featured Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Redgrave in the cast.
In 1970, a film version of the play featured Alan Bates, Joan Plowright, Ronald Pickup and Laurence Olivier, who co-directed.
In 1990, a production at the Gate Theatre in Dublin featured real-life sisters, Sinead, Sorcha and Niamh Cusack in the title roles, with their father Cyril Cusack also in the cast.
A year later, a London production saw Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave appear
onstage together for the first and only time, while their niece Jemma Redgrave played the youngest sister, Irina.
In 2011, Blake Morrison wrote a version of the play for the Northern Broadsides company which brought out the parallels with the Brontes.
The Herald, September 23rd 2014
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When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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