Three Sisters

by Anton Chekhov, Lucy Caldwell (Translator)

Overview

I don't know what it is I'm going to do but I'm going to do something. I'm going to be someone. I am! I'm sick of just being me. I'm going to be someone else. Someone better. I'm going to make a difference.
Three sisters, Orla, Marianne and Erin, dream of escaping their tedious suburban lives for a fresh start in America. It is Erin's eighteenth birthday and, as the sun shines and guests assemble, everything for a fleeting moment feels possible.
Relocated from a Russian provincial town in 1900 to East Belfast in the 1990s, Lucy Caldwell's new version of Chekhov's Three Sisters opened at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in October 2016.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571334926
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	11/03/2016
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Anton Chekhov and Lucy Caldwell
Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist and short-story writer, was born in 1860, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf. After graduating in medicine from Moscow University in 1884, he began to make his name in the theatre with the one-act comedies The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding. His earliest full-length plays, Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889), were not successful, and The Seagull, produced in 1896, was a failure until a triumphant revival by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. This was followed by Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), shortly after the production of which Chekhov died. The first English translations of his plays were performed within five years of his death.
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various - New Irish Short Stories.

Editorial Reviews

It was inevitable that the American theater's most Chekhovian writer, Lanford Wilson, would be asked to translate Chekhov. The great Russian's influence marks virtually all of Wilson's plays, from "Balm in Gilead" to "Fifth of July" and "Talley's Folly". What could not have been predicted was how sensitive and intelligent a translator Wilson would be. First commissioned by the Hartford Stage Company in the early 1980s and rewritten several times since its first production in 1984, Wilson's "Three Sisters" is a breathtaking, evocative work in which every character springs to life on the page. Of course, even in stilted translations, one feels for the play's central characters--Olga, Masha, and Irina--and their fruitless yearning to transcend their petty lives and see Moscow. But in Wilson's literate, highly readable version, one comes to understand and feel sympathy even for the play's so-called villainess, the gauche upstart sister-in-law, Natalya. We eagerly await Wilson's next translating project: "Uncle Vanya".

Jack Helbig