The play focuses on the lives of three sisters, Olga, Masha, Irina, young women of the Russian gentry who try to fill their days in order to construct a life that feels meaningful while surrounded by an array of military men, servants, husbands, suitors, andd lovers, all of whom constitute a distraction from the passage of time and from the sister's desire to return to their beloved Moscow.

"In 1997, David Hare adapted the little-known play, Ivanov, and revealed the young Anton Chekhov as a markedly different writer from the one English-speaking audiences recognize from the more familiar plays. Now Hare has turned his attention to the other, equally surprising key work of Chekhov's youth - an abandoned seven-hour teenage manuscript in which a Russian schoolmaster faces up to the implications of being irresistibly attractive to four different...