In The Chekhov, three performers wait through a series of crises, an endlessly changing series of scenarios, that move constantly between comedy and tragedy.

Waiting for Greta Thunberg to solve the climate crisis.
Waiting for Ukraine to win the war, still.
Waiting for Bergen to open a ramen shop.

The Chekhov is an inside–outside choreography that uses words, activism, punk music, and pyrotechnics. Three Sisters by Chekhov is the story of three sisters who have lost both parents, who struggle to find meaning in their present context – a small provincial town – while longing to return to Moscow, and who suffer inaction and disenchantment. In Nicola Gunn’s The Chekhov, female complaints, decrescendos, studies in waiting and the occasional firework transpose the story to the present moment, exploding punk-meets-classic-literary aesthetics.

The Chekhov re-composes the themes and narrative structure of Anton Chekhov’s 1901 play Three Sisters to connect to the present post-Covid bewilderment, ecological and humanitarian crises, and the ‘contemporary experience’. The ‘contemporary experience’ is widely held to stem from a profound sense of uncertainty or shock in the face of the unimaginable, resulting in a loss of fixed points of reference where neither the world nor the self any longer possesses unity, coherence, or meaning.