“Everybody’s talking: a new production – and translation – of Chekhov’s everyday masterpiece” by Elizabeth Lowry (TLS)

This is by far the funniest description of the most annoying Chekhov’s play:

The Prozorovs are members of Russia’s ineffectual liberal intelligentsia. They are full of ideas about the nobility of work, despite the fact that none of them, apart from the eldest, the stressed-out teacher Olga – played with magnificent restraint by the Globe’s artistic director, Michelle Terry – has ever done much of it. Ruby Thompson’s Irina is woefully naive, enthusing about the importance of manual labour while being easily diverted by gifts of spinning tops and little notebooks and coloured pencils. Andrei, the “intellectual” Prozorov brother, is an eternal student who hopes to become a faculty professor in Moscow. Middle sister Masha, languishing in a boring marriage to the schoolmaster Kulygin (“She was eighteen when she got married, and she thought he was the cleverest man in the world. And now she doesn’t”), craves change. She gets this when she meets the sexy, sad Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin, with his depressed wife and his musings about destiny and human evolution. ©