HEADLONG

I loved Chris Goode's plangent deconstruction of 'Three Sisters'. This improvisatory piece, where the actors are prompted by random cues, games and sheer whim to riff on the themes of Chekhov's play, is like jazz-theatre. And like jazz, it has a yearning, lyrical impact, thanks equally to the live talent of the performers and their inspired original score.

On press night it opened with a letter, unsealed and read by an actress who has never seen it before. 'We're in the dark,' she explains, feelingly. 'And you're in the dark, too.' For the audience, total illumination never comes. (Director Goode has preserved the emotional story of Chekhov's play through its four-act structure, but its plot details are literally torn off a notepad and thrown up into the air.) But by making the shared future of the audience and actors a compact of uncertainty (at least for the next 90 minutes), he makes you feel the play's requiem for a lost future in an acutely new way.

There are flaws, but it is disarmingly beautiful. At the end the love affair which endures is the one between Chekhov's play and Goode's re-animation of it.

Chekhov's plays have fences around them and "Hands off" notices plastered all over. Think of the outrage that greeted Katie Mitchell's reworking of The Seagull, or the Wooster's Group's Chekhov deconstruction Brace Up! Similar howls may accompany Chris Goode's playful and, by the end, desperately moving reimagining of Chekhov's Three Sisters.

From the start, when the cast of five women and one man draw straws and open envelopes, we know the play is a game that is being played. What follows is 90 semi-improvised minutes in which the architecture of the play remains the same even though the walls have moved.... For me the experience was akin to that disconcerting prickle you get with deja vu. You simultaneously know and don't know what is coming next. It shakes up your expectations, makes all your certainties uncertain; it is constantly illuminating and reordering the relationships.

Purists may shudder, and though the play is sometimes thrilling, it can also be difficult and frustrating to watch. But it is never gimmicky. For all its play on play, there is something pure about Goode's vision and the way it is realised by an extraordinary cast and a technical crew who, like the actors, must respond second by second to each other. There is even the possibility that the rabbits might burrow to Moscow and provide the sisters with a last-minute escape. On the night I was there, the final 30 minutes became so intensely taut and textured - physically, spatially, emotionally - that it felt as if these sisters were speaking directly to me, reminding me that, in both performance and life, we are all ghosts in an empty theatre, constantly performing, and forever giving up and going on.