Drei Schwestern

‘I find it fascinating how in theatre we have classics that are staged time and again. We therefore have characters who have to experience the same things all the time. In our case they are the

three sisters’. - Susanne Kennedy

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. 

In 2005, the British-German Kennedy graduated from her studies in theatre directing in Amsterdam. After this, she worked in the Netherlands for years, among other things for Het Nationale Theater in Den Haag and the ITA-Ensemble in Amsterdam, where she directed her own adaptations of classic stage plays. Together with theatre artists Boogaerdt /VanderSchoot, she also produced installation-performances, including Hideous (Wo)men. From 2014 on, she mainly works in Germany, among others for the Munich Kammerspiele. 

In her work, Kennedy steers clear of psychological realism and consistently aims for abstraction. For instance, Chekhov’s 19th-Century living room might become a white cube. The performers wear rubber masks on their heads and have unchanging blank facial expressions as a result. They sit or stand in this space as if petrified, their voices sounding hollow and mechanical, as if after hundreds of performances the words have lost their sheen. 

Kennedy is specifically interested in this element of repetition here. In Chekhov’s play, the three sisters Masha, Olga, and Irena dream of trading their uneventful lives in the provincial town they live in for the adventure and excitement of the big city in Moscow. However, Russian society is at a turning point, and the sisters are afraid. What if it makes no difference at all? What if they flee and everything stays the same anyway? Are they forever trapped in the moment? 

This last point is particularly relevant to Kennedy’s adaptation. She draws parallels with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche on what he termed eternal recurrence. Kennedy: ‘One of the questions [Nietzsche] asks in The Gay Science is: What would you do if a demon came to you at night and told you you would have to live this life again, just as it is, in all its details? Would you desperately throw yourself onto the floor and curse the demon? Or would you worship him and answer with an emphatic 'yes'? With a 'yes' to this life as you’re living and welcoming it in the here and now. Being willing to ask this question in itself causes an inner transformation. By asking the three sisters this question, I ask my audience the same. In the end, it’s a question we all have to ask ourselves’.