Tchekov Play Finely Produced

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 846, 14 December 1929, Page 31

Tchekov Play Finely Produced

“THE THREE SISTERS” "The Three Sisters," revived by, Philip Ridgeway at the Fortune Theatre, London, recently, is the loveliest of all Tchekov’s plays, writes Alan Parsons in the “Daily Mail.” Though coloured throughout with the profoundest melancholy, it has not the black gloom which darkens “The Seagull,” and it possesses in the fullest meSsure the essential Tchekovian quality of delicate, intangible, elusive beauty: the final speeches of the sisters, with their heartbroken cry of “If we could only know,” are, like the concluding speech of Sonia in “Uncle Vanya,” exquisitely written and deeply affecting. Rosalinde Fuller, Margaret Swallow and Prudence Vanbrugh are the three sisters, eating out their hearts with boredom in a dull provincial town, and dreaming only of a return one day to Moscow. M. Komisarjevsky’s production is in the perfection of taste; his beautifully contrived lighting, -with its strange shadow effects, is sometimes almost too discreet, but he gives us a succession of unforgettable stagepictures. As a producer of Tchekov he has no rival.

This week the Auckland Little Theatre Society delighted audiences in Whangarei with two performances of the Drinkwater comedy, “Bird in Hand.” Joan Greenleaf was played by Miss Isabelle Lorrigan in place of Miss Janet Clarkson, who is. in Australia.