Frau Frankenstein has been at it again – tinkering with the good doctor’s tele-transporting discombobulating machine.

Last night the good burghers of Schloss Süddorf were, by degrees, disorientated, terrified, excited and in one or two extreme cases overjoyed to a state of delirium by the results of Frau F’s demonic experiments. No doubt with (one hopes) the best of intentions, the unnatural tinkering with laws beyond our ken has resulted in a creature of unimaginable strangeness.

The experiment, as it appeared to your correspondent, involved the ambitious attempt to transport a work by the esteemed (dead/white/male) playwright, Anton Chekhov through time and space. In the process of travelling through the aether, the disembodied particles, prior to reassembly, had become intermingled (by what alchemy we know not) with artworks too numerous to allow a full taxonomy. The resulting entertainment was of such Byzantine complexity, such awe inspiring novelty, such mirth inducing levity that a due and comprehensive report on the event defies our powers of description.

Glimpsed through the coruscating display of terpsichorean art, choral   accomplishment, musical facility and thespian exuberance, were flashes of the Russian master’s original conception of rural enervation and unused female life force. Revealed to us in various tableaux, as it were by flashes of lightening, the sisters appeared embalmed in an insufferable lassitude.

Now transported to a twenty-first century urban setting Mses., Masha, Olga and Irena were eager to escape the mind-numbing conformity of yet more gendered expectations, the casting off of which involved exertions such as to give more delicate sensibilities an attack of the vapours. Nothing loath the Three, aided and abetted by two further ‘sisters’ of impeccable musicianship, went about their task with an energy and display of talent that carried all before it.

With theatrical invention as its lifeblood, we can say that this was as definitive a display of the re-appropriation and re-balancing of cultural discourse as Her Majesty’s subjects might be expected to entertain. We trust that the experiment with all its attendant consequences for natural philosophy and the humanities will excite interested parties to further experimentation when results, as in the present case, can be so beneficial to the goals of the enlightenment.  And to those who hold such tinkering with the established canon as anathema we recall Cromwell’s words to the Church of Scotland, ’I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible you may be mistaken.’

Putting it another way; RashDash have produced a corker; satire so sharp you hardly notice the cuts.   ★★★★★   Graham Wyles   13^th June 2018

Photo by The Other Richard