So in some ways it is a shame that mostly I was a little disappointed. A lot of this was down to bad seating as I was completely outpriced in any levels lower than the balcony), or rather bad seating combined with an ill-suited set design. The stage was dominated by a large bridge stretching across it, from most seats I expect this would have been fine, from the stalls it was probably stunning - but for us in the balcony it hid the vast majority of the action - everything that wasn't set at the very front of the stage in fact. Even the set visual pieces for the top of the bridge lacked any power for us because the actors' heads were cut off. It was definitely a prime example of getting what you paid for.
There was also a revolving section of the stage, which the pre-show write ups had made a lot out of and which if it had been more consistently used might have made some difference to the restricted view. But it only went into action very occasionally to represent moments when the characters lives were 'swirling' out of control, for me it felt extremely underused, I would have preferred some gradual movement throughout (perhaps I think that the world is always a little out of control), it would have felt for me less gimmicky, although then it might have lost impact. Though I did like that it wasn't strictly reserved for moments of craziness, which seems a bit cliched, but also occurred at Vershinin and Masha's first meeting - the madness of love and all. The use of the revolve might also have added to the feeling of the play being very stationary when it wasn't moving - it seemed to lack energy. Although this may just be a more Russian performance style that I'm not used to - they certainly seemed to like moments of still tableau.
This disconnection between Russian and English theatre has also left me feeling a little unqualified to talk about the performances in the play - I feel as if I would be using the wrong set of criteria to judge them. As if I'm not armed with suitable tools. I felt that Olga Drozdova, Alyona Babenko and Culpan Khamatova were all very good as the eponymous sisters and I ended up really loving Sergey Yushkevich as Kulygin, who completely changed my opinion of the character and made me fall in love with him. Others had less impact and I must admit I was a little confused by the decision to cast the very young, very skinny Ilya Drevnov as brother Andrey who's constantly referred to as growing stout.
My biggest problem of the night though was definitely with the surtitles. I could see them at least, which had been a concern but they were so limited that I grew incredibly frustrated. I'd re-read the play the day before which ended up being both a blessing, as at least I wasn't lost, but also a curse as I could see how much they were missing out. I can understand that translation offers a particular challenge as you can say a lot more with less words in Russian than in English, but they'd simplified this down to the most basic elements needed to understand what was happening - I could see from some of the actions dialogue I remembered from the play - but that wasn't appearing in the surtitles. Worse, it completely lacked any sense of poetry. A real shame as the translation I have has some gorgeous moments. Also not being close to the stage, I couldn't just ignore the surtitles nor do the mixture of both that worked so well for me with the BFT - where so much of the story telling was told through emotion and expression.
In the end I was just somewhat frustrated and very underwhelmed.
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