Surtitle fatigue

Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like glimpsing the Titanic from a bathoscope. The new seating is supposed to make the Barbican’s overlarge space feel more like a theatre and less like the Nuremberg stadium. But even with fewer seats, the stage is still as large as an aircraft hangar. This gives it a mood of rangy airlessness which is intensified by Nick Ormerod’s slick and perfunctory design based on chairs and bric-a-brac variously disposed and a couple of flats carrying suggestive photographs. I had a horrible feeling that Ormerod’s aim was to create a set that would be easy to build, dismantle and transport. (The show is nomadic, with global aspirations.) What’s lacking is any physical suggestion of the house where the sisters live. How I longed to see a wardrobe or a doorway. Or just a window. Or even a shelf.

The production, in Russian, and adeptly directed by Declan Donnellan, is perfectly easy to admire and rather difficult to like. Your eyes have to flip constantly between the text overhead and the play beneath, and there’s very little humour to ease the mental gymnastics. The casting might have been better too. Irina Grineva (Masha) bears a stunning resemblance to Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago while her would-be lover Alex Feklistov (Vershinin) bears a stunning resemblance to René in ’Allo ’Allo! Both are fine actors but Feklistov has the erotic firepower of a tortoise on Prozac. The show lasts three hours and 20 minutes and by the time I dragged myself home I was actually looking forward to Question Time.