In Three Sisters Susanne Kennedy starts from a topical scene of Chekhov’s classic: the three sisters Masja, Olga and Irina dream of leaving the Russian province for a more exciting life – “to Moscow!” –, but are immobilized by the fear that their lives will stay the same. Kennedy accurately works on a change of perspective: if Chekhov’s Three Sisters is generally read as symbolic of the decadence of pre-revolutionary bourgeois society, her sisters as simply trapped into female roles too often described in attitudes of waiting and passivity. Susanne Kennedy is one of the most important German directors today, here for the first time in Brussels. With Three Sisters she imagines a time capsule travelling throughout centuries, from adaptation to adaptation, from role to role. Zapping from one scene to the other, we find for instance ourselves in the middle of My Three Sisters, a Venezuelan telenovela that shares nothing but the title with Chekhov… and back to the Russian classic again. It is an impressive and magistral scenic result, carefully constructed, and with a unique way of acting, alluding to Second Life and our daily pleasure in projecting and observing our identities in virtual scenarios. Three Sisters ultimately asks whether we would make other choices, if our lives were endlessly repeated: “It’s a story that happened yesterday, but I know it’s tomorrow.”

Confronted with the SARS-CoV-2 crisis, we had to cancel this project