Financial Times, July 27, 1991, by Andrew St. George.
"Vodka in a French pantry"
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The Chichester Festival continues with a little post-
revolutionary Russian history primped and coiffed for the 
French parlour. "Tovarich" is a light situation comedy which 
everywhere shows its previous incarnation as a Broadway 
musical. Do not expect Eisenstein here; the show barely 
manages to touch on the revolution, preferring instead to 
depict in two hapless Russian emigrees the nobility of 
reduced circumstances by showing the circumstances of 
reduced nobility. The result is an enjoyable but 
insubstantial evening stiffened with diverting comical 
anecdote. 

It is Paris in 1932. Prince Mikhail and Grand Duchess 
Tatiana are a couple of White Russian aristocrats long on 
grand gestures and short of resources. The Prince has been 
trusted with four billion Tsarist francs for the future; but 
while he waits for the Tsar to return to Russia, he and the 
Grand Duchess decide to support themselves by entering 
domestic service in the household of a French banker. There 
they charm the house, and things go with the crash of a 
vodka glass in a grate until a former Bolshevik turns up for 
dinner, and the new Russia meets the old. 

The play knows that ideas travel upwards and manners 
downwards; and it is the simple inversion of this truth that 
gives the comedy its situation. The Russian blue-bloods 
maintain impeccable manners; their employers are such 
arrivistes that they fail to recognise the butler and maid 
as Russian Royals on their uppers. The domestic round 
becomes an exercise in learning tout ce qu'il faut from 
servants who have the final word on the etiquette of 
everything from hot water bottles to settling up with the 
local tradesmen. 

As an emigree play, it lacks the integrated wit of Neil 
Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" or the poignancy of Ronald 
Harwood's "Another Time," both about living in the new world 
while being nostalgic about the old. However, in its more 
serious moments, "Tovarich" teaches the romantic appeal of 
an untouchable past and laments the passing of an age, the 
entropy of empire:'Russia was great, and still is, only now 
it's scattered - there are little Russias everywhere, in 
Vienna, in London, in New York, in Paris.' 

Tovarich really serves as a showcase for the Russian prima 
ballerina Natalia Makarova, who plays the Grand Duchess with 
great verve. This is her first theatre role, and her 
performance alone makes the evening worthwhile. Opposite 
her, Robert Powell as the Prince seems genuinely lost 
without six thousand horse to command, but prepared to trust 
to providence and comfort himself with the thought 'God is a 
Russian.' 

The blustering French banker is well played by Rowland 
Davies, all apoplexy and incredulity, while his wife is 
beautifully fashioned by Sarah Badel as a diaphanous horror. 
Tony Britton's old Bolshevik has a voice as sharp as a 
Siberian frost, and provides the appropriate ballast for the 
final scene. Patrick Garland's direction sensibly stands 
aside to let the one-liners flow, and conjures some fine 
moments. 

Picture, Natalia Makarova and Robert Powell in 'Toravich' 
at Chichester 



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