Behind glass screens and dressed in funeral black, the last four members of the Prozorov family stand around a grave as the audience take their seats. While the action of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters begins exactly a year after the death of the titular sisters’ father, this loss overhangs much of the play.

Three Sisters opens on preparations for the 22nd birthday party of the youngest sister Irina, played by Miranda Daughtry, in a large house on the edge of a remote town where the well-educated, city-raised children (urban elites, essentially) moved for their father’s job on a military base. Beginning with the party, the play presents snapshots across five years of their lives.

^{Alison Bell as Olga in Sydney Theatre Company’s Three Sisters. Photos © Brett Boardman}

This new adaptation for Sydney Theatre Company by former Artistic Director Andrew Upton, directed by current Artistic Director Kip Williams, gives Chekhov’s play a modern, Australian feel. It’s set broadly in the 1970s, though the Moscow the sisters long for is replaced simply with “Home”, leaving the setting to drift in an abstract space that doesn’t commit to a location.

Chekhov’s text is...