Times, July 28, 1991, by Robert Hewison.
"Power play and words that hurt"
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<snip>

A prima ballerina diva assoluta must be the nearest thing 
these days to a member of an imperial family, so it was a 
stroke of genius on the part of Patrick Garland to invite 
Natalia Makarova to the Chichester Festival Theatre to play 
the Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna in "Tovarich," a 
sentimental French pre-war comedy by Jacques Deval that has 
also had a life as a film and a musical. 

Makarova is no great actress, but her sense of presence 
makes the fragile plot about two White Russian aristocrats 
forced to become maid and butler in a Parisian banker's 
household sustainable as long as it lasts. Robert Powell 
gamely keeps up with her Russian accent; Rowland Davies and 
Sarah Badel provide comic support as the stout bourgeois 
couple who collapse when they discover whom they have 
employed. Tony Britton is a more sinister figure as the 
commissar who once interrogated and raped the Duchess, but 
such unpleasant thoughts are banished by the sight of 
Makarova with her imperial train in one hand, and two milk 
bottles in the other. 



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