Three Sisters

When director Susanne Kennedy (1977) takes a classic text as a basis for a play, she makes it all her own. Whether Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, or, as now, Chekhov’s Drei Schwestern (‘Three Sisters’), the original characters’ lines play only a minor part in her plays. Kennedy is especially interested in the unspoken desires of Hedda, Petra, or in this case the sisters. In her claustrophobic stagings, she magnifies what goes unsaid, and possibly cannot be put into words at all, to frightening proportions.