Daily Mail, July 26, 1991, by Jack Tinker
-----------------------------------------------------------

Chichester continues to revive its shaky festival fortunes 
in unexpected ways.

I would not have wagered two roubles at present market rates 
on a successful revival of Jacques Deval's fragile 1930s 
boulevard comedy under the present political and economic 
climate.

The vicissitudes of an exiled and impoverished Russian grand 
duchess and her soldier prince, forced by the Bolshevik 
revolution to wait at table and wash dishes for a nouveau 
riche French banker and his self-satisfied family, scarcely 
smacks of pressing excitement.

Even on screen with Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer as 
the ducky, plucky aristos, it was a frightfully laboured (if 
Their Highnesses will pardon the expression) and dull 
affair.

However, here in the country with the servant problem being 
what it is, the audience warmed to its built-in inverted 
snobberies with mounting fervour.

Certainly the notion of having one's household flawlessly 
run by such a stoic and impeccably mannered pair as this is, 
if you don't think too deeply, inviting in the extreme.

However, director Patrick Garland manages to give his gently 
self-mocking revival a much more biting edge than this.

For in Natalia Makarova, the great ballerina in the starring 
role, we not only have an artist of true distinction, but 
someone who can matchlessly convey the undaunted, autocratic 
soul of the dispossessed Russian.

She positively defies us to sneer at the play's romantic 
absurdities. Her dignity, her wit, her authority are 
absolute, even when her hold on her lines or English 
pronunciation is not.

And Robert Powell, her consort in this quasi-political 
nonsense, also strikes exactly the right note of vaguely 
manic patriotism, which can be laughed with but not mocked.

Whether or not we believe that such a pair, given such 
appalling humiliations and tortures we are told were heaped 
upon them back home in revolutionary Russia, could ever be 
persuaded to sign away their dead Czar's four-billion-franc 
fortune in their trust--and to the very man who inflicted 
these cruelties!--the Chichester audience was in no mood to 
arbitrate.

They loved it. I still have my reservations, but in a star 
vehicle the stars were definitely in the driving seat.



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.