Chekhov shows us the death of the Russian bourgeois in excruciating melancholy. A strong influence on Bergman (duh), Three Sisters as a work of art is just incredible in its exploration of decadence, lost dreams, responsibilities, and the seductive nature of common vulgarity.
This particular production and film is dominated by a young Joan Plowright - who owns every minute on film.
This has always been a haunting play, in that like Dostoyevsky’s Demons it all but predicts the Russian Revolution. It’s madness that Europe took its open, liberal, middle-class cosmopolitan society and threw it away for the dirt and death of the Somme and Verdun.
They were so sure their society could never end. That the freedoms and lifestyle they had come to know would never shift. And aren’t we as well?