Three Sisters National Theatre, London SE1
Topdog/Underdog Royal Court, London SW1
Who would have thought the most radical play to open in London this week would be white, middle-class, drawing-room theatre? But with Katie Mitchell's dazzling new production at the National, Chekhov's Three Sisters (often played as an ode to failed aristo longing) is transformed into an urgent, contemporary family drama that asks all the big questions.
Three-and-a-half hours fly by. In contrast to Peter Stein's new Edinburgh production, this is 'slightly de-Russified' Chekhov. For a start, there is a new translation by Nicholas Wright (award-winning author of the Chekhovian Vincent in Brixton). True, it may upset the purists - emotions are 'trashy'; the nightmare sister-in-law Natasha is a 'small-town bitch'; and obscure references to the Russian writer Lermontov are replaced by Byron. But these modern touches resonate brilliantly with the text.
In the play, the Prozorov sisters love being photographed, so Mitchell projects these family portraits on to the backcloth, making us realise that our own ancestors, rigid in their Sunday best, were probably bursting with equal passion and despair. Although the play is located in an upper-middle-class milieu - all ticking clocks, Christmas fairylights and expensive china - there is an extraordinary otherworldly quality.
Scenes are punctuated by dreamy slo-mo sequences, reminding the audience that, although this is nineteenth-century theatre, we are fully cognisant of modern cinema techniques. She also takes as her starting point the idea that Chekhov was influenced by the Brontës of Haworth. Certainly, the opening scene of three gifted sisters, trapped in a provincial backwater, scurrying around after their hapless brother, rings true.
On the shelf at 28, Olga, an heroically weary Lorraine Ashbourne, brings the house down with the observation: 'I would have loved my husband.' Irina (Anna Maxwell Martin) is a blonde, self-absorbed, twentysomething who ends up being exquisitely tortured by a banal job in the post office (could you get more modern?). Eve Best as Masha, the doppelgänger for Charlotte Brontë, is alternately luminous and drained. All three sisters pine for the sophistication of Moscow, so the arrival of a dashing commander in their midst is delicious to behold.
Played by Ben Daniels, arguably Britain's most versatile actor, Vershinin is a study in understated self-pity. But then, like a master cineaste, Mitchell alternates moments of pathos with broadbrush comedy. It is striking how, in the best ironic sitcom style, characters begin every sentence with 'I', while protesting empathy with their fellow human beings. We laugh at their fantasies of noble, blue-collar employment as they loll about, eating, drinking and directing the serfs. But they have a point. Work really did turn out to be one of the important projects of the twentieth century, especially for women. And there is something unbearably touching about the way that characters such as Vershinin and Solyony, Irina's Byronic suitor, think their own unhappiness will be eclipsed by the joy of future generations (yes, they do mean us - it's a humbling thought).
You leave the theatre vowing never to moan about anything again. At the Royal Court, Suzan-Lori Park's searing two-hander, Topdog/Underdog, comes garlanded with awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. At the heart of the play is the fact that African-Americans are the section of the population most likely to be unemployed, without health care or in prison.
Yet Park chooses to set her play in a claustrophobic tenement room, occupied by two squabbling brothers, in the tradition of Beckett and Ionesco. Younger brother Booth (rapper-turned-actor Mos Def) is an accomplished shoplifter, while Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright from Basquiat) is a reformed cardsharp, eking out a living as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator.
Dressed in top hat, raggedy suit and white face, Lincoln is a classic Beckett figure, although the Uncle Tom parallels are clear (he is shot every day by white visitors to the fairground). There is a vaudevillian quality to the production, with its mix of street slang and obscenity. Both actors are rich in physical and verbal humour. Over the course of the day, they bicker and rap their way through topics ranging from pornography to dating. Lincoln teases Booth for carrying a loaded pistol during a date at home, while Booth tells Lincoln he needs a working phone line to convince women 'that you ain't got no wife or wife approximation on the premises'.
And yet there are problems with the play. It is at times boring. The interminable card-hustling-scenes lack the rhythm or cunning of, say, Mamet, while the set-up seems faintly reactionary. When is the play set exactly? How do these figures connect with modern urban culture? Why do they have such depressing views of women? It is only in act two that we get a scene of unparalleled psychological insight as the brothers recall being abandoned by their parents at the ages of 16 and 11. It was as if, Lincoln recalls, their mother and father each had something in their lives (sex, alcohol, drugs?) more alluring than their children. And both these 'somethings' finally won out.
The writing in this scene is beautiful, fluent and utterly contemporary, especially when Booth starts to fantasise that perhaps their parents didn't separate after all. Maybe they planned to leave their children, then meet up again and have more children together. You couldn't get a more powerful fantasy of abandonment. The other great thing is the audience. Watching stylish black youth stream into the (predominantly) white Royal Court, I found myself tempted to review the audience rather than the play. The highest compliment - it felt like being at someone else's party.
Three to see
The Taming of the Shrew Globe, London SE1 All-female version, with Janet McTeer as Petruchio and Kathryn Hunter as the Shrew.
Elmina's Kitchen Cottesloe, London SE1 Last performances of Kwame Kwei-Armah's terrific gang-life play.
After Mrs Rochester Duke of York's, London WC2 Polly Teale's marvellous evocation of the writer Jean Rhys.