ABSTRACT

[The production] fell between a reading and an imaginative rendering of the play. The angers and despairs of these sisters pining for distant Moscow became tantrums. . . . In the first act Irina with her ‘How lovely it is today’ had to look out on a naked beige tree set against a sky of dark indigo. In the third there was little excitement of a fire and no discernible glimpse of a blaze through the window as set down in the stage directions. Here were merely three drooping Brontes incapable of a single novel between them though they put their heads together for all time, and handicapped with a Branwell married and still more manqué. All the immanent evil of Solyony too went by the board, and as little as seems possible was made of the subtlest thing in the play - that persistent dwelling on time's passing. . . .