BELFAST writer Lucy Caldwell has taken on a major classic for her latest writing challenge, with her reimagining of Chekhov’s evergreen play Three Sisters, currently being staged at the Lyric Theatre.
The award-winning novelist and short-story writer, who had her first novel Where They Were Missed published in her early 20s to much critical acclaim, is not one to shy away from an artistic challenge.
A mother herself, Caldwell took on abortion and women's right to choose, one of the most contentious and emotive issues facing women today in Ireland north and south, in a short story commissioned for a recent anthology showcasing northern women writers, The Glass Shore.
Her recent well-received first collection of short stories, Multitudes, dealt with the sensitive subject of teen suicide and she has explored male infertility for a short story written for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
Caldwell is also an acclaimed playwright whose radio and stage plays – Leaves, Guardians and Notes to Future Self – have won awards, including the George Devine Award and the BBC Stewart Parker Award. So she jumped at the chance when the opportunity came along to adapt a famous play which had mesmerised her since she was a 19-year-old student and stage it in her home town.
“Three Sisters is a masterpiece. Staging Chekhov is fiendishly difficult as it can seem completely flat or be really boring as you think that nothing is happening in the play until you realise that everything has happened,” Caldwell acknowledged ahead of the play’s opening night last Thursday.
“I’ve made a few changes and you can feel the crackle of it as it starts to come to light.”
Since then, opening night reviews were not as universally positive as the writer would have hoped for.
“I will be back on November 12 for closing night and it will be a completely different play than it was on opening night,” she promised then, however, perhaps with the foresight of the seasoned writer that she is.
Caldwell, who has one leg in London where she lives with her architect husband Tom and two-year-old son William, and the other firmly planted in Belfast, had long wanted to do her version of Three Sisters; she herself is one of three sisters who were raised by parents Maureen, a Catholic, and Peter, a Protestant, in east Belfast.
“I’ve always felt a personal connection to the play since I’m the eldest of three sisters,” Caldwell told me. “And I always felt that it could work set in Belfast, in the 90s, my teenage years.”
Instead of Chekhov’s three Russian sisters dreaming of a new life in Moscow at the dawning of the 20th century, then, Caldwell’s adaptation is set in post-ceasefire Northern Ireland.
“Chekhov wrote it at the end of the 19th century when everything is changing,” she continues, “And the soldiers [from a nearby army base] were leaving, and that sense was also here in Belfast in the late 1990s with the gradual withdrawal of the troops.”
However, she also confessed that the play did not initially appeal to her when she came across it.
“I first read a scene from the play as a student studying stage writing when I was 19,” the softly spoken 35-year-old said. “Funnily at the time I didn’t think much of it, although I knew it was a masterpiece. But something strange happened over the subsequent weeks where it just grew and grew and grew inside of me. And it hasn’t stopped since.
“It’s one of the best plays that I know about yearning, about that sense of longing and belonging, of trying to find that place where you truly belong and waiting for the moment for your life to begin, only to realise that it began long ago without you even realising it.”
She always knew that her Three Sisters would be radically different to the 20-plus productions she has seen over the years.
“I think that I saw one too many productions that was too upper-middle-class English, all languid gentility and crumpled linen suits," she said. "For me there is such a raw, restless punky energy to the play about these sisters who were so spirited and they want their lives to begin.
“I just wanted to do a version that brought all of that energy to it that I haven’t seen in some productions.”
Adapting Three Sisters is something that obviously means a lot to Caldwell both personally and professionally. In her introduction to the published play script published by Faber & Faber she wrote: "Writing this version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters felt like coming full circle, coming home, in more ways that one. My own 90s Belfast, my own teenage years. My first major play in my home city, my first play in the theatre I first saw plays in.
"This is a play of haunting, yearnings, leavings real and imagined. A play of love, and loss, and letting go. I have left, and I have come back. Or maybe you can never truly leave at all."
:: Three Sisters is running at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, until November 12. For tickets visit. www.lyrictheatre.com; for more information on Lucy Caldwell’s work visit www.lucycaldwell.com
