International Herald Tribune, August 7, 1991, by Sheridan Morley.
"The British Stage: 'Tovarich,' Rubles-to-Rags Comedy"
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After a thoroughly shaky artistic and box-office start to 
the summer season, Chichester has found itself the hit it so 
badly needed with Jacques Deval's "Tovarich." 

Almost 60 years old, unseen in Britain since the end of the 
war, and on Broadway only in a somewhat catastrophic Vivien 
Leigh musical version, this is in many ways the perfect 
Chichester play in that it deals with the servant problem, 
the disappearance of old money and the social issues arising 
when the new bourgeoisie finds itself in charge of the 
ancient impoverished regime. The only amazement is in 
finding that the play has never before been seen in West 
Sussex. 

The movie of 1937 starred Claudette Colbert and Charles 
Boyer, but originally it was the great Eugenie Leontovich 
who made the stage success. That role now goes to the prima 
ballerina assoluta Natalia Makarova who brings to it much 
the same broken-English charm and eccentricity that was for 
many years the key to the local success of Yvonne Arnaud. 

Makarova and Robert Powell play the White Russian 
aristocrats who, reduced to Parisian poverty by the 
unfortunate revolutionary events of 1917, have to become 
butler and maid to an upstart banker and his overfed wife. 

In essence therefore, we have two quite distinct plays here: 
one is the old "Admirable Crichton" comedy of manners about 
servants being vastly superior to their superiors; the other 
is a rather more serious look at what was for the mid-'30s 
still an extremely topical issue, the plight of the old 
Russian aristocracy when separated from its rubles and 
Chekhovian estates. 

But the brilliance of Deval and his original American 
translator, the dramatist Robert Sherwood, was to unite 
these domestic and political themes in a social satire of 
elegant and tremendous expertise. And Patrick Garland's new 
Chichester production - one that will doubtless soon find 
its natural London home at the Haymarket - is a textbook 
example of period high comedy. 

Makarova, though still in trouble with the English language, 
swoops and flutters around the stage like some demented 
ostrich as Grand Duchess Tatiana, while Powell as her weary, 
destitute prince has precisely the right air of grace under 
pressure from all sides. 

Up against them, we have Rowland Davies and Sarah Badel as 
their wonderfully gauche employers, and, cast against type, 
Tony Britton in a fine last-act appearance as the commissar 
who manages to retrieve the tsarist fortunes to bankroll 
another decade of communism. 

Period pieces seldom come more perfect than this, and its 
ending, with the grand duchess, who is still a maid, 
carefully leaving out the milk bottles for the morning 
before setting off in full regalia to a gathering of exiled 
Russian royalty, has a fabulous neatness in construction. 

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