Andrewsdirects Chekhov

Benedict Andrews can still quote by heart a letter he received 11 years ago, following his breakthrough production of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Sydney Opera House. “'I wish you luck with your career as a director of music videos,'” it read, “so you can leave those of us who fondly remember something called theatre to get on with it.”

Andrews is the kind of director who ruffles feathers. His eight-hour staging of Shakespeare's histories in 2009 prompted one critic to groan: “Benedict Andrews is my nightmare of what director's theatre can come to,” while the Telegraph's review of his modernist, futuristic production of Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses last year began with the straightforward declaration: “I didn't like Benedict Andrews's new production … one bit.” That original staging of Three Sisters was clearly a sign of things to come: “I threw so many things at it. The stage was covered in Star Wars toys, there was disco music playing. The production was a mess, actually – in a good way.”

That was 2001, and Andrews was 29. Now 40, and one of Australia's most admired theatre directors, he is tackling the play again, this time for the Young Vic in London. The two productions will be completely different, he says – not least because he himself has matured. “I'm much more interested in people. All I really want to do is watch very good actors playing and being truthful.”

This is Andrews's third production in London this year, following his luminous revival of Big and Small at the Barbican, in which Cate Blanchett played a woman struggling to find her place in an uncaring society, and his more challenging staging of Caligula at the English National Opera; this filled the stage with the raked seats of a sports stadium, connecting the volatile Roman to dictators through the ages. His new setting for Three Sisters is similarly striking: Johannes Schütz's design features a mound of mud instead of the forest of trees that customarily surrounds the sisters’ country mansion. The cast, he admits, were shocked when they first saw it.

Right from day one, he says, he expects his actors to be “emotionally raw, and to not hide”. (Blanchett, who has collaborated with Andrews, describes his rehearsal room as “muscular – brutal, even”.)

Instead of commissioning a new translation or working with an existing one, Andrews wrote his own adaptation of the play, which was completed by Chekhov in 1900: even on paper, his modern-language version feels fiercely political, emphasising the characters’ sense of imminent change during a period when communism was brewing. Much of its language echoes the work of the radical philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose pronouncements on the collapse of capitalism have made him a darling of protesters worldwide.

Andrews began his directing career in Adelaide, where he was born, then spent a formative period at Berlin's Schaubühne, in the early 2000s – a theatre renowned for full-on, full-frontal directing. His first production there, of Sarah Kane's Cleansed, was “a real baptism by fire”. It wasn't just that he couldn't speak the language: German actors, he says, “leap to metaphor” and expect their directors to “have ideas beyond the literal”. British actors (this production is his first with an all-British cast) are more restrained. “I'm encouraging them to break through that into something raw and sometimes messier,” he says.

Over the last few years, he has directed in Reykjavik, Berlin, and Melbourne as well as in the UK; ask him where home is and he replies: “There's sort of nowhere, yet.” He's hoping to settle in Iceland, where his partner, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, lives and works, and has turned down offers to run theatres in Australia to do so.

Even this, though, has fed his approach to the play. Living in “a perpetual state of homesickness” has given him an insight into Chekhov's siblings, stuck in their provincial backwater and dead-end lives, perpetually yearning for Moscow. It is, he says, “an exemplar of what's become a key condition for us, which is a homesickness in our own lives”.

Andrews's sense of estrangement has fed his own work as a writer. In the past two years, he has written four plays; so far, only one – Every Breath, about a wealthy family facing an obscure threat – has been staged, a production Andrews directed himself. This was received with a degree of vitriol from Sydney's critics, one of whom dismissed the play as “intellectual masturbation”. “They're not well-structured, well-made plays,” Andrews says. “They do strange things, maybe too strange. There's a kind of noise in them that people find a bit scary.”

Three Sisters will be frightening, he hopes, and speak to our own anxieties about politics. “For me, it could just as easily be an Icelandic banker, or someone who owns a supermarket chain, or the new rich in Russia. People do not want to believe that there is a huge class gap in society: we want to believe we're all part of this iPod world.” Now, as in Chekhov's time, people have “a sense of end times, or a sense that everything might collapse.”

The Guardian