At the end of Chekhov’s play, eldest sister Olga laments: “The time will come when...we will be forgotten, our faces, our voices, and even how many of us there were.” This drew a knowing laugh from the audience watching Chris Goode’s deconstruction/reimagining of the piece. Goode’s cast of five women and one man seem to have their initial roles determined by chance each evening, depending upon the opening of an envelope, but as the 90-minute performance continues they switch roles, sometimes with two or more playing the same part at once, so that indeed it is as if history has forgotten how many sisters there were. Or rather, not quite. We, after all, have not forgotten, hence the laugh is knowing.

Goode is an endlessly questing theatrical tinkerer who invents formats, constraints and directions in order to find a paradoxical freedom in them, and who is constantly exercised by the notion of theatre as an immediate, renewing and renewed experience. His intention here is that, by freeing the play from the textual form so many of us know and allowing the actors to find their own shape for it each time, they and we together might undergo something akin to the experience of performing and watching it for the first time today.