3 Winters review – generous, surprising and extremely powerful
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/dec/07/3-winters-review-croatia-national-theatre-tena-stivicic
Lyttelton, National theatre, London
The struggles of one Croatian family mirror the strife of a whole country in Tena Stivičić’s intricate new play
Every now and then someone announces that political theatre is dead. Last week’s plays knock that on the head, in utterly different ways.
Howard Davies’s productions of eastern European drama have been one of the glories of the past decade at the National. No director so compellingly brings together detail and panorama. He has pulled this off again with 3 Winters.
The most marvellous moments in Tena Štivičić’s new play are particular and fresh, and miles away from a history lesson. Yet they make the world tilt around them. A young woman in an old lace wedding dress whirls through a grand room. Her severe sister, sporting sleek trousers and a keen sense of justice, looks on. As does, from a painting, a Titian-haired aristocratic beauty. Tomorrow the whirler will be married to a sharp, probably dodgy uber-businessman. She will save the crumbling, beautiful house in which she has been brought up. She is not an heiress but she is an inheritor. This is Zagreb, Croatia, in the 20th and 21st century, made up of layers of different lives, aristocratic, fascist, communist, capitalist. And in this play, hurrah, mostly female.
Štivičić was born in Yugoslavia, grew up in the new Croatia and now lives in London; her great-grandmother was a maid in a grand house who was shunned when she fell pregnant and was ostracised. She drew on her own experience and on family history for 3 Winters, which splices together scenes set in 1945, 1990 and 2011. It pays to have a good head for genealogy if you are to avoid spending the interval puzzling about – for example – what the relation of the woman with frostbitten feet is to the one who gets beaten up. Unless you’re a whiz at the dates of Croatian regime changes, it’s worth scrutinising the programme notes. Actually, it is always worth scrutinising the National’s programmes – which makes them rare theatrical beasts.
The warmth and intricacy of Štivičić’s writing makes you want to make these efforts and pulls you through some initial bemusement. When she eventually turns her kaleidoscope so that earlier hints and forebodings fuse into a complete picture, the result is generous, surprising and extremely powerful. Sympathy is never straightforward here; the unions and dissolution, principle and corruption of the family echo those of a country in flux.
Tim Hatley’s design – chandelier, grandfather clock, an utterly un-British blue – is impressive, detailed, substantial, but under threat from outside. Dominic Muldowney’s music invades the house with beautiful and melancholy street tunes on accordion, clarinet, tamboura. Between scenes, Jon Driscoll’s video projections – of political meetings, of citizens patiently picking their way through rubble – engulf the stage and expand the horizons.
3 Winters is is at the Lyttelton, National theatre, London SE1 until 3 February 2015