...SISTERS - PRESS REVIEWS
WHATSONSTAGE.COM - Michael Coveney
“…a quick, ingenious 90-minute skim across a masterpiece.”
“…Goode’s show has a fresh and appealing tone, and is beautifully designed by Naomi Dawson in a big conservatory-like room with hanging flower baskets...”
“The lighting and sound effects are outstanding, creating an organic poetic environment for the play and the playing around.”
“Fascinating.”
http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8821213349301
THE STAGE - Jason Best
“Chris Goode’s new staging…takes the text apart from within, deconstructing the drama and then reassembling it in the hands of six actors who improvise a different version of the story each night.”
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/20993/sisters
THE GUARDIAN *** 4 STARS - Lyn Gardner
“…Chris Goode’s playful and ultimately desperately moving reimagining of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.”
“You simultaneously know and don’t know what is coming next. It shakes up your expectations, makes all your certainties uncertain, and is constantly illuminating and reordering the relationships.”
“…there is something intensely pure about Goode’s vision and the way it is realised by an extraordinary cast and a technical crew who, like the actors, must respond second by second to each other.”
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/reviews/story/0,,2285597,00.html
FINANCIAL TIMES *** 3 STARS - Ian Shuttleworth
“It is impressive to see how completely the performers inhabit the moment”
“Impressive”
“His (Goode’s) intention here is that, by freeing the play from the textual form so many of us know and allowing the actors to find their own shape for it each time, they and we together might undergo something akin to the experience of performing and watching it for the first time today.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/14a81dc8-3959-11dd-90d7-0000779fd2ac.html
METRO - Maxie Szalwinska
“radiant performances”
“Naomi Dawson’s design has a delightfully ramshackle, garden-shed aesthetic.”
“The lighting is dreamy and so is the soundscape”
“If you let it, …SISTERS takes you on a beautiful, stumbling dance of disparate souls”
TIME OUT ***** 5 STARS - Caroline McGinn
“This improvisatory piece, where the actors are prompted by random cues, games and sheer whim to riff on the themes of Chekhov’s play, is like jazz-theatre. And like jazz, it has a yearning, lyrical impact, thanks equally to the live talent of the performers and their inspired original score.”
“They (the actors) deliver intensely lit fragments of Chekhov’s speeches.”
“disarmingly beautiful.”
http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/events/740002/sisters.html
POSTCARDS FROM THE GODS - 17 June 08 - Andrew Haydon
“This is indeed a successful and imaginative way of working with a classic text and, rather than obscuring the play, is indeed a fascinating way of re-seeing it.”
“The Gate Theatre is currently enjoying a renewed sense of vitality under the new joint artistic directorship of Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami.”
“The choice of six performers looks like a who’s who from Britain’s alternative theatre scene.”
“Goode’s translations (adaptation?) of the script renders the language as very modern, surprisingly fresh and almost punky in the way that the sisters express their suffocating sense of being betrayed by life.”
http://postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2008/06/sisters-gate-theatre.html
NEW YORK TIMES - 7 July 2008 - Ben Brantley blog
“The young cast members brought…intensity, bravery and faith to the proceedings”,
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/london-theater-journal-just-how-many-prozorov-sisters-are-there-anyway/#more-496