Reviewing the Royal Exchange's production of Three Sisters earlier this week, Alfred Hickling voiced what I suspect many watching Chekhov's play might think but seldom dare say: "[Y]ou simply wish that the characters would buy a ticket to Moscow and stop going on about it." I have a faint recollection that back in the mid-1980s Annie Griffin made a performance piece based entirely on that premise.
I can't say I've ever felt irritated by the characters in Three Sisters, a play to which I am devoted, but I've watched Romeo and Juliets where I've been inwardly screaming, "Die. Just get on and die," every time the young lovers appear. Although I adored Ian Charleson as Jimmy Porter when I saw him play the role at the Young Vic when I was in my early teens, I've seldom since seen a Jimmy in Look Back in Anger whom I haven't wanted to leap onto the stage and strangle. In Trevor Nunn's recent staging of Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, Imogen Stubbs and Iain Glen's smugly unsympathetic Marianne and Johan were so irritating I felt an unexpected odious joy as their marriage fell apart.
Characters that could be monstrous are frequently a pleasure on stage, as Richard III and Bev in Abigail's Party demonstrate all too clearly when played by the likes of Antony Sher and Alison Steadman. It is often the characters that are supposed to be sympathetic that present more of a challenge. Penny Gold's recent Hampstead play, The President's Holiday, about the coup that unseated Gorbachev, so spectacularly failed to evoke sympathy for its protagonists that I began to wish that somebody would put the entire family up against a wall and shoot them all.
There have been productions of Hamlet where I've wanted him to just stop procrastinating and get on with the job, and I've seen Ophelias whom I've wanted to personally drown. I've lost count of the number of Miss Julies I've wanted to slap and Blanche DuBoises who need a good shaking. In fact Williams's alcohol sodden cry babies probably deserve an irritating category all of their own, as do several of Edward Albee's creations including Martha in Virginia Woolf.
Of course, sometimes – as in the case of The President's Holiday – it is the writing that is to blame, but often when characters give you a headache on stage it is nothing to do with the playwright and everything to do with miscasting or a poor production or performances. I've seen Three Sisters where Masha's announcement that she is in mourning for her life has been greeted with sniggers and also those (Fiona Shaw, in particular) where the same statement is unbearably moving. I suspect that it is a sign of a sluggish production when you want to start issuing tickets to Chekhov's sisters or are volunteering to be first to take the axe to The Cherry Orchard. A really dreadful performance can make the most sympathetic character seem a bore, hence the famous story about the actor playing Anne Frank who so got up the audience's nose that when the Nazi's arrived they shouted out, "She's in the attic!"
I felt much the same when I saw the recent recast and very dull revival of The Sound of Musical. Of course it works the other way, too. The superb Lindsay Duncan invested the utterly absurd, drunken, pill-popping mum in Polly Stenham's That Face with a genuinely tragic quality. It was against the odds because the the character was called Martha.
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