Daily Telegraph, 28 July 1991, by Charles Spencer
-----------------------------------------------------------

Patrick Garland, the director of the Chichester Festival 
Theatre, deserves our thanks. In "Tovarich" he has unearthed 
a little gem of a play, flawed certainly but still sparkling 
more than 50 years after its premiere.

This is the kind of boulevard comedy, with no loftier 
ambition than to entertain, which the snootier critics 
affect to despise and everyone else applauds to the rafters. 
Written by the French playwright Jacques Deval in 1934, it 
enjoyed great success in London the following year. 
Garland's is the first major revival in this country since 
then.

He certainly does it proud, in best Chichester tradition, 
with handsome sets, elegant costumes, and a first-rate cast 
dazzlingly led by the great Russian ballerina Natalia 
Makarova, appearing in her first straight play and 
dispensing heavily accented charm by the bucketful. The 
action is set in Paris in the early Thirties, where two 
exiled white Russians, Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich 
Ouratief, and his even grander wife, the Grand Duchess 
Tatiana Petrovna, niece of the Tsar himself, are down to 
their last few sous in a run-down hotel. With no way of 
paying the bill, the terrible truth has to be faced: they 
must get a job.

This loving, top-drawer couple become maid and butler to a 
corpulent bourgeois banker and his family and since they 
have both been courtiers to the Tsar himself, they prove 
admirable servants. There is a delightful P.G. Wodehouseish 
quality to this central section of the play, with the Prince 
offering infallible migraine cures to his blustering new 
master ("I can see butterflies," says the likeable fattie 
ecstatically after drinking the potion of vodka, pure ether 
and gunpowder), while the Grand Duchess romantically 
enslaves both the banker and his son and ingeniously 
contrives to bring a touch of passion back to her mistress's 
fading marriage.

There are splendid moments of high comedy, too, when the 
employers finally realise just who their servants are amid 
agonised bouts of self-abasing embarrassment, but sadly this 
amiable play runs out of steam in the last act. This ought 
to be the cue for an act of elaborate revenge. Instead Deval 
goes all sentimental on us with a lot of soggy stuff about 
the Mother Country.

If the play transfers to the West End, which I suspect it 
might, it could do with some substantial cuts here, or, 
better still, a complete rewrite. At present far too much 
comic potential is going to waste.

Happily the action picks up again in the last few minutes, 
and no time spent in Makarova's company can really be 
described as wasted. You don't often come across star 
quality like this. Her fractured English is a delight (at 
times the accent is so thick you can't understand a word 
she's saying and it matters not one jot), while her grace 
and beauty make the heart lurch. She's funny and sexy, and 
she even gets to dance.

As her husband, Robert Powell does well not to be totally 
upstaged, and he has some fine comic moments of his own, 
most notably when limping round the stage with a ceremonial 
sword hidden in his trousers. There's strong support, too, 
from Sarah Badel as the amorous wife and, best of all, from 
Rowland Davies as the besotted banker, a natural farceur 
whose slow-burn reactions are a wonder to behold. He's sadly 
missed in the dodgy last act, but perhaps it's churlish to 
grumble about a production that offers as much undemanding 
pleasure as this.



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     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.