Interview: 'Everyone Is Aware of Bringing Chekov Into a Shakespeare Building": Actor Shannon Tarbet On THREE SISTERS at The Globe

With a starry The Seagull opening soon at The Barbican, the peerless playwright is in vogue right now, his unstable worlds of uneasy transition chiming with the nervous times. On the banks of the Thames, the third of the fab four tragedies, Three Sisters, (or should that be comedies?) is receiving rave reviews.

BroadwayWorld's Gary Naylor sat down with Shannon Tarbet, who plays Masha, to talk about the great Russian's debut in the home of the great Englishman.  

Anton Chekhov in Shakespeare's Globe. No pressure there! What's the vibe like, because I think this is the first time Chekov's been done here?

Yes. I think that everyone is very aware of the importance of bringing Chekov into a Shakespeare building, two of the greats together in one space. 

It’s a very complex play. I feel like the more that we're working on it, the more I'm realising that it's not straightforward, because Chekov doesn't write straightforward people. And to try and make any concise, clear decisions about any of them that makes for a happy resolution in some way is not possible - there's constant layers to unearth. But we're all very, very excited to be doing that here at the Globe. 

Tell me a bit about rehearsals so far, the thing we never see? 

The process has been like a deep dive into this world, not just historically, but also into such complex individual psyches and then understanding how they all work together. It's involved a lot of conversations leading to really clear decisions throughout the scenes. When there's a certain shift in mood or intention within the scene that affects everyone, it just really helps to merge an ensemble to get on the same page. 

In the Japanese film, Drive My Car, its central narrative is about producing Uncle Vanya in multiple languages. It starts table read-throughs - is that how you started here or do you start with walking around? 

We didn't do so much of the table read-through. Typically, you would do the first week of rehearsals as table works. You’re all sat around the table and you're mining the script for information. But even on our first read-through, we split it up. We read through Act One and then we were talking about it and then we read through Act Two. So, it was a process even in that way. We never had a clear beginning-to-end moment because there's always so much more information in there. So we were on our feet pretty quickly. 

Aline [David], our movement coach, is in with us pretty much most days and also an intimacy coach, vocal coach and musicians. We are taken out of our little cave, working on the text, to work together on movement or singing, these different creative elements continually popped into the process. As the process continues, we see it all coming together in practice.

Chekhov was gone at 44 having lived a noble life. So the writer is not in the room, but there's a sense in which the boss is, because Michelle Terry, The Globe’s Artistic Director, is playing Olga, one of ‘your’ sisters. What's that like? 

She creates a sense of safety because of her experience as an actor. The way she carries herself through the room creates this dynamic where we can talk to her or we can take her aside and figure things out together and have these conversations. 

How does that work with the director (Caroline Steinbeis) herself? 

Well, they've worked together before, so, they've got their shorthand that powers the dynamic between them - they've already figured it out for themselves. I'm seeing the result of them knowing each other so well for so many years at this point in their career. 

Three Sisters is a classic play, but is it saying something in 2025? Is that relevance coming through the unpacking in rehearsals?

Yes, it certainly is. Talking about mental health, one's psyche, one’s emotional intelligence has evolved so much. This play deals with despair and pain and suffering and complication and complexity. Much of that is repressed, but we now have a lot more understanding of those matters. We're able to mine the text from a deeper understanding of what's really going on here and not just reacting to it. It's not just about people missing each other and not quite getting each other - there's a lot more reasoning behind that. 

It's useful to see that on stage now with that kind of perspective, because it's quite easy to look at many of the characters and kind of write them off. But now we have a much broader understanding of their suffering and greater compassion - it's not just a matter of “That person sucks”. 

Three Sisters must play differently post-lockdown. Does that emerge in your own experiences of coming to the text? 

Yeah, I think so. A lot of what the characters are experiencing is aloneness and isolation. For some, that brings discomfort, but for others it creates a sense of safety. That was something that many of us felt during lockdown, developing our relationship with that aloneness. This play certainly does touch on people's experience with isolation. 

People involved in theatre, almost by definition, don't feel the paralysis that affects the sisters. They get up on stage to challenge themselves and to challenge others. So how do you access that quite different mindset that the sisters, and Masha in particular, can't seem to escape, stuck but with an element of comfort in the stasis?

Yeah, almost like a negative pleasure around it. Honestly, that is one of the big things that I'm figuring out for Masha, the experience of being trapped within the life that she has created for herself, the choices that have led her to this point, stuck emotionally, stuck in her body, stuck in her expression. I really feel that for her, but I'm still working out how to express that on stage. With Masha it can be so easy to jump straight to the volatility and the reactivity, which she does have, but there's a reason for that and I'm still trying to figure out how that plays out in her body on stage without undermining her or not respecting the pain that she's in. 

One of the things I've always found with Chekhov is that he is so up to date. Olga, Masha and Irina’s decisions are, of course, circumscribed, but they can clearly see there's a better world out there - they've not been so acculturated to subservience that they're incapable of seeing it and that only deepens their tragedy. 

There's this rebellious loudness in them, but ultimately they can't escape what culture is or its impact on women mentally, emotionally and spiritually. That's where that conflict is - resisting the patriarchy, yet unable to break free of it. 

It's all those reasons why can't they grab hold of the agency they crave. That's not all personal, it can be cultural, it can be emotional, so many things that stop them from being able to grasp it, including part of that negative pleasure too. When one is in such suffering and all one knows is suffering, it can feel unsafe to experience anything other than that. 

You're playing neither the eldest nor the youngest sister. Tell me about the awkward middle one, Masha - where does she fit into the story? 

Well it's a really tough one because she also doesn't live with her sisters. She's in a marriage now, but definitely not a happy one. You see it increasingly throughout the play, her not knowing her place within the sisterhood and within the house that itself is such a focus for the play. 

Because she's married, she definitely can't go to Moscow, but Vershinen, a fellow Muscovite, comes into her life and he represents that unattainable thing. But she is aware that she has some power. 

I also find it interesting how, by the end of the play, it's not like they've committed to each other - neither of them have left their partners. So I'm trying to figure out what is this relationship between them. Is it real love? Is it what they believe to be love and hope to be love? Or is it, secretly, not something that they actually do really want to commit to because if they did, they would have to leave their partners. So yeah it's… complicated. 

In an opera they'd just jump in a troika and there'd be all the stirring strings and they'd go off into the snow and find a tiny village in Ukraine. 

I don't think it's as romantic as that. I think it's way more complex and messy. It's just creating more suffering really. It's just adding to the canon of suffering. Because now we're hurting the feelings of our partners. We're complicating our own lives even more. We're complicating our marriages. There's the suffering of knowing I'm with this person and yet they're unattainable at the same time. I can't have them. 

I'm also exploring the option that she loves her husband, Kulygin, as I don't want it to be as black and white as Masha being in this marriage that she hates, with a husband she doesn't want to be with, because it's not truthful. It's not interesting to play and explore that - it's just too easy. 

I like finding way more complexity in this marriage that is really unhappy, because Kulygin can’t see her as she is. Masha can't meet him where he wants to be met, so that creates suffering but there is some type of attachment there (I hesitate to say love). It’s the same with Vashinen. She’s in love with two people, but neither can meet her needs. 

So many Mashas have come before you - do you research how they have done it or do you start with yourself and work inward to find the truth of Masha?

There was a temptation much earlier on in the process, before we even started rehearsals, to look into other Mashas because I see how daunting it is as a role. She goes so deep into this well of suffering that it was tempting to think that someone's done it before, maybe I could use their textbook. But to do that would mean going on stage every night with an inauthentic approach to Masha. I would be so uncomfortable doing that every night and there are an infinite amount of ways that one can approach a role because you're still saying all the same words, you've all the same beats in the scene. You can't avoid those, but you can explore varieties within that, and I've wanted to find my own route into Masha. 

When one looks at some aspects of the play, it feels so foreign, but the people and the emotions are universal. Chekhov makes no judgement - that is important, because judgement holds you back. When I did overcome that, my heart opened up, and with it came true compassion for the characters in their universality.   

I'm currently on this precipice. I feel like I've done a lot of the groundwork to understand her and now it's more about how I can freefall into who I believe Masha to be, and let that come alive. 

My last question is always the same - why should someone come to see this production?

It's a tricky one, because there are multiple reasons, but I'm going to say the one that most resonates with my heart. People should see this production because the ensemble that has been put together to honour and express these storylines and these characters is just amazing! I was stunned from the first day people started reading out their roles and I just felt like wow this is perfectly cast and the choices that they make, the presence that they're in, is stunning. 

Three Sisters runs at Shakespeare's Globe until 10 April

Photo images: Johan Persson

Read BroadwayWorld's review of Three Sisters here.

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