Olga character profile

Olga character profile

The character I have been given to play in three sisters is Olga.
-She is the oldest sister
-Teaches at the school gymnasium, later given the job of headmistress
-She doesn’t enjoy her job
-As the oldest, feels a responsibility to make sure her sisters are happy
-Thinks she is old and ugly
-Feels like she is to old to marry, and so stuck in a job she cannot escape


Olga’s objectives
Super objective is to move back to Moscow where she lived as a little girl
The actions she takes to make sure this happens is nothing. All threee sisters continuously talk about moving back to Moscow but make no effort to actually making it a reality.
Her objective in my scene is to make sure her sisters have a good time on Irina's name day and to keep herself distracted from marking books.
The actions she takes to achieve these objectives is to keep the mood light and fun by softly teasing her siblings in a loving way. Also to distract herself she keeps getting involved in conversation to avoid marking books.

Themes in Three Sisters

Romance and affairs

People within the play are married (unhappily) and have affairs with each other but are they doing it out of loneliness or love?

Masha and Vershinin

Both of these characters are unhappily married and find each others company the perfect distraction from home life. They both claim to love each other however at the end of the play they do not end up with each other. So was it actually love?
Maybe Masha does love her husband but was just bored with her life and wanted some excitement to feel alive again. Also Vershinin and Masha spoke about being together but when the time seemed to come, Vershinin pulled out and Masha ended up back with her husband.

Natasha and Protopov

Natasha never really liked Andre and was intending to marry Protopov until she meet Andre. She decided to marry Andre but always loved Protopov and carried on seeing him whilst being married. She doesn't even try to hide it from her husband, showing that she is not ashamed of her actions.

Tragedy

The three sisters, from the beginning, want to move back to Moscow but they never do.
Irina is young but thinks she needs a husband for security. Both Tuzenbakh and Solyony ask for her hand in marriage, in the end she chose Tuzenbakh who she prefers but she doesn't really want to marry either. On the day they are to go off to be wed, Solyony challenges Tuzenbakh to a duel and Tuzenbakh dies. So in the end she marries no one and has to go back to her draining job.

Andre marries Natasha who instantly starts an affair with the man she truly loves, Protopov, which is sad because Andre really loves her. On top of all that Natasha slowly starts to take control of his household and basically throws his sisters out on their arses. The sisters never actually wanted her to move in which their brother never really understood, this is pretty ironic because they were right about her being bad news.

Three sisters outline

Anton Chekhov's Trisestry 1901; Three Sisters

This play follows the story three sisters Olga, Masha and Irina living in a small Russian town in the 1900's. Throughout the play the three sisters main objective is to move back to Moscow but instead of actually doing anything to achieve their goal they just sit around complaining. They are all unhappy with their lives and find people in their village to be boring and so spend most of their time with army officers they knew from their father, who is now dead. Irina is the youngest sister and cannot find her purpose in life and thinks the best thing to do is work, but when she finally gets a job she finds it very hard and so decides to marry. There's two possibilities to whom this may be to, Tuzenbakh or solyony. she choses Tuzenbakh. As this is all going on Masha is off having an affair on her husband with battery commander Vershinin, which her husband later finds out about. The three sisters have an older brother Andre whom marries a village girl named Natasha. The sisters never warm to her and right so because she turns from a shy and timid person, into a bitter evil character hell bent on ruining their lives. Natasha slowly takes over the Prozorov's household whilst Andre racks up a big gambling debt which he has to bit by bit mortgage the house to pay off. By the end of the play Natasha is completely in charge of the house and leaves the sisters out on their own, alienated from being inside. Irina is ready to leave to marry Tuzenbakh, but gets news he has been shot in a duel against Solyony leaving her purposeless and having to go back to work. Masha's ending isn't any better, she is left by her lover Vershinin however her husband forgives her and takes her back without many hesitations. She basically ends up back in a loveless boring marriage. Olga takes the job of headmistress at the school she teaches in, reluctantly, she never wanted the job but doesn't see anything else on the horizon for her.
~fin~

My first impression

Before my class broke up to go on our half term we got given our plays that we are going to be working on when we come back. The class has been split in 3 each group with a different play by Anton Chekhov. These three plays are Cherry orchard, The seagull and Three sisters. I got placed in the group with the play Three sisters.

Over the holidays I read through the play however I found it hard to keep focus when reading. The first act felt very dry and long for no particular reason with not much but general conversation being discussed. However as the play progressed things started to happen and I thought that it would start to take the play in a different direction, it never did. A good example of this is the fire in Act 3, there is panic and tension about but then it all quickly dies down and the play is back to its dull setting.

This kind of unsureness throughout the play on whether it is actually going to go anywhere is like the three sisters lives. Their super objective throughout the play is to move back to Moscow and we are never sure whether they ever will. Also the dullness of the play is just a reflection on how repetitive the three sisters lives are. Its always the same people in each scene with not much changing. Their live are so dull they are led into having affairs or marrying the wrong people just for the sake of it.

I also took it upon myself to see what the play would look like when  it comes to life. Therefore I went online and watched BBC's version of Three sisters from 1970 and was amazed at how easy the words flew off the page and made a performance that was very different to how it reads. When it was a written play I found it hard to keep interest when reading but as I watched it being performed I enjoyed it and got a much better understanding of what was going on because I was fully engulfed by the performance. This gave me a better feeling about having to study and perform it myself because based on first impressions of reading it, I thought it was going to be boring and drag a little bit. But now after seeing that when the play is brought to life you can add things like humour that you might not have necessarily been able to place when reading, it is going to be something a little bit new to me but very interesting to work on.