Three Sisters (play) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Desmond MacCarthy

Critical Essay by Desmond MacCarthy

SOURCE: A review of The Three Sisters, in The New Statesman, Vol. 14, March 13, 1920, pp. 676-77.

MacCarthy compares the characters and plot of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House to The Three Sisters and reviews an early production of The Three Sisters.

“What does Bernard Shaw know about ‘heartbreak’—gay, courageous, resilient, handy, pugnacious, indispensable man that he is?” I reflected as I walked slowly away from the Court Theatre, where the Art Theatre Company had been acting Tchekhov's play The Three Sisters. For I had been sitting three hours (or was it months?) in real “Heartbreak House”; not in a “Heartbreak House,” of which the roof, as in the case of one London music-hall, was sometimes rolled back, releasing all the stuffy used-up air, leaving the antics of humanity bare to the speculation of the stars; not in a house of which at least half the inmates were crackling...
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