Anton Chekhov

Prozorov house, it creates this thermodynamic effect. Exhausted or drunken, in some way exacerbated by the calamity, the characters pour out their feelings and then leave. It is the most hysterical of all the acts and the most confessional. To no avail does Olga protest, 'I'm not listening, I'm not listening!' Ibsen in Ghosts and Strindberg in his last plays used the image of fire to represent the end of a world of lies, the last judgement that will purify mankind and reveal the truth. In Three Sisters, the fire leaves the sisters unpurified, although their world is rapidly being consumed; amid the desolation, they are simply charred.

Once again, Chekhov constrains his characters to come in contact by preventing privacy. One would expect the bedroom of an old-maid schoolteacher and a young virgin to be the most sacrosanct of chambers; but through a concatenation of circumstances it turns into Grand Central Station, from which intruders like Solyony must be forcibly ejected. The space is an intimate one, just right for playing out intimate crises; but the confessions and secrets are made to detonate in public. The Doctor's drunken creed of nihilism, Andrey's exasperation with his wife, Masha's confession of her adultery, even when addressed to unwil­ling hearers cowering behind a screen, become public events.

Or else the private moment is neutralised by submersion in minutiae. Masha makes up her mind to elope with Vershinin. Traditionally, this would be a major dramatic turning-point, the crux when the heroine undergoes her peripeteia. Here, the decision is lost amid plans for a charity recital, Tusenbach's snoring and other people's personal problems. The chance tryst offered by the fire trivialises Masha's and Vershinin's love because it projects it against a background of civic disaster. Even their love-song has been reduced to 'Ta-ram-tam-tam', the humming of an aria from Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin. In other words, what is crucial to some of the characters is always irrelevant or unknown to the others, much as the seagull had been. It may, ultimately, be no more significant than the hand-me-down garments which are useless to Olga but of prime importance to the fire victims. This impartial­ity of Chekhov's in meting out consequence is not unlike Alfred Jarry's absurdist 'pataphysical axiom, that truth lies only in exceptions, or, as Chebutykin keeps saying, 'It's all the same'. Chekhov, however, does not insist on the impossibility of values and communication; he simply believes that the attribution of value cannot be made by myopic mortals.

The last act adjusts the angle of vantage. There is very little recollection in it, but a good deal of futile straining towards the future. A brief time has elapsed between Act Three, when the regiment's departure was off-handedly mentioned, and Act Four, when it occurs. The departure is so abrupt an end to the sisters' consoling illusions that they cannot bring themselves to allude to the past. Henceforth they will be thrown back on their resources. The play had begun with them lording it over the drawingroom, but now they are cast into the yard. Olga lives at the school, Masha refuses to go into the house, Andrey wanders about with the pram like a soul in limbo. Food has lost its ability to comfort. The Baron must go off to his death without his morning coffee, while Andrey equates goose and cabbage with the deadly grip of matrimony. Each movement away is accompanied musically: the regiment leaves to the cheery strains of a marching band, the piano tinkles to the lovemaking of Natasha and Protopopov, and the Doctor sings 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'. The bereft sisters standing in the yard are made to seem out of tune.