Director Howard Davies’ series of classical Russian dramas in the Lyttelton, staged periodically over the last several years, have consistently shown a simultaneous scope and delicacy, an ability to choreograph events in extended families and (often unnaturally) sizeable houses without resorting to a broad-brush approach to fill the space. 3 Winters by Tena Štivičić is neither classical nor Russian, but is very much the latest element in this series.
    
Štivičić sets her play in a house in the Croatian capital Zagreb. As the title suggests, she bounces backwards and forwards between three discrete years. In 1945 Rose King and her family are assigned by Tito’s new government a portion of the prosperous townhouse in which Rose’s mother had been a servant; in 1990, Rose’s daughter Masha is now the mother of two daughters of her own; in 2011, the younger of those daughters is on the eve of her wedding to a perhaps shady businessman. But these are significant dates for Croatia also: 1945 saw the (re)building of Yugoslavia after World War Two, 1990 the first serious fractures in the Yugoslav federation which would lead to war in the Balkans, and in 2011 Croatia was midway between its accession to NATO two years earlier and the EU two years later.
    
Štivičić’s metaphor – the house stands, of course, for Croatia itself – is remarkably complex yet never heavy-handed. The familial and social ties we see portrayed are first and foremost those of the individuals concerned; only after the interval, as matters focus more strongly on 2011, do we appreciate how they also personify classes, groups, a nation which has never been truly the pilot of its own destiny and now negotiates yet another new and radically different age. The story is in particular that of women seemingly unable to escape being perceived as daughters, wives etc. even when in reality they are the active parties.
    
Old stagers such as James Laurenson and Susan Engel are complemented by the likes of Siobhan Finneran as Masha and Jodie McNee as her mixed-up but questing daughter Alisa. What could have been little more than a lecture acquires an organic body and soul.
     
Written for the Financial Times.