Times, July 26, 1991, by Benedict Nightingale.
"Sentimentality showing its age"
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Few plays of the 1930s had greater success than this comedy 
by Jacques Deval. As last night's programme reminded us, it 
became a movie, with Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer as 
the pukka Russian emigres who turn to domestic service for a 
living. As it might have added, the play was liked and 
lauded by the royal family, the Soviet ambassador to 
Britain, the American communist paper The New Masse, and 
Adolf Hitler, who saw it four times, having first checked 
Deval had no Jewish blood. In a divided world, his likeable 
if glib tale of reconciliation found plenty of takers. 

Now here it is again, deftly directed by Patrick Garland, 
with Robert Powell and the Russian ballerina Natalia 
Makarova in Boyer's black tails and Colbert's frilly apron; 
but undeniably showing its age. It is unlikely to inspire 
the aristocrats of recession-hit Sussex to pester the 
agencies for jobs as butlers or maids. Nor can it be 
guaranteed to touch the heart of any dictator or mass-
murderer visiting the Festival Theatre. Ours is an age 
suspicious of sentimentality; and this is a very sentimental 
piece. 

The best of it is the middle. The Grand Duchess Tatiana has 
given the food on which she spent her last centimes to the 
starving. Her husband, Prince Ouratief, has refused to give 
four billion francs, entrusted to him by Tsar Nicholas, to 
finance a counter-revolution he knows will fail. Now they 
have moved under assumed names from their shabby-genteel 
hotel to the solid bourgeois house of a solid bourgeois 
politician and his solid bourgeois wife. These they treat as 
deferentially as the Tsar and Tsarina, to whom they were 
once Chamberlain and Lady-in-Waiting. 

This produces one or two hilarious encounters. Rowland 
Davies's podgy Arbeziat is promptly cured of a migraine by 
his butler with an all-Russian cocktail of vodka, ether and 
gunpowder. Complaining that the maid has entered without 
knocking, he is passionately seized by the legs and implored 
for the punishment due an uppity servant: a whipping, 
immersion in ice-cold water, and a kiss of peace. Soon even 
his snobbish son is on his knees and baying like a dog, 
moonstricken by Makarova. 

There are plenty more opportunities for comedy here, but 
Deval takes few of them. Suddenly Sarah Badel's chunky, 
overdressed Madame Arbeziat finds her dinner guests 
curtseying and bowing at servants they inexplicably 
recognise. A moment later, she and her husband are plunged 
into a spluttering mix of embarrassment and obsequiousness. 
But with this unmasking the fun prematurely ends and the 
seriousness starts, for on the guest-list is Tony Britton, 
playing a white-bearded commissar forced to sell bits of 
Mother Russia for the four billion francs without which five 
million peasants will starve. 

Guess what Powell, always the grizzled romantic hero, and 
Makarova, stiffly exuding rectitude, proceed to do with 
their loot. Britton may once have stuck a lighted cigarette 
in one's hand, and made passes at the other, but they know 
their noblesse oblige. Soon a cheque is being signed and the 
word ''tovarich'' winging across the kitchen table. Stalin 
has, so to speak, come to an accommodation with the ghost of 
the Tsar. If only the 1930s had gone on to prove so simple. 
If only the world were that nice now. 



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