What happens to Chekhov's Prozorov sisters 20 years on? We shall find out soon, when the Orange Tree stages Reza de Wet's sequel, Three Sisters Two, showing life under Lenin. In the meantime Sam Walters presents Chekhov's original in a new translation by Carol Rocamora. Although I have seen more grandiose versions, I have rarely encountered one that brought out so clearly the play's real protagonist: time.
Nothing apparently changes in the play's three years. And yet everything is subject to time. The brigade leaves town. Tusenbach is killed. Andrey's wife, Natasha, takes over the whole house. And the sisters' hopes of reaching Moscow recede. The characters themselves are aware of time's ravages: they harp obsessively on their ages, and clearly measure present predicaments against past hopes.
Three performers in particular capture that sense of the corrosive effect of time. Octavia Walters's Irina starts out as a bright-eyed optimist and ends up so crushed that even the baron's death seems just one more disappointment.
David Antrobus's Andrey, a would-be professor, also reminds me of Cyril Connolly's remark that the pram in the hall is the enemy of promise. By the end Antrobus has become a self-hating figure rancorously describing his wife as "a petty, blind, treacherous little beast".
Only Jason Baughan as the cuckolded schoolmaster, Kulygin, manages to confront his shredded marriage with a wan, touching dignity.
It's a problem of in-the-round staging that only half the spectators can see Kulygin eavesdropping on Masha's farewell to Vershinin. For all the ingenuity of Margarete Forsyth's design, with its overhanging birch branch, one also misses the exact passage of the seasons that is another mark of Chekhov's preoccupation with time. And Louise Bolton's Natasha is too obviously the predatory villain rather than someone repaying the patronising Prozorov sisters back in kind.
But this is still a fine production that allows you to focus on Chekhov's temporal themes. It also makes you impatient to know just how the three sisters will survive the Russian Revolution.
· In rep until April 13. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
