Theme And Variations
by Michael Glenny, Samuil Alyoshin

Critic John Simon writes that this play "...has been bittersweetly delighting Soviet audiences for some 10 years nonstop.

I can see why.

It is an unintentional cross between Cyrano de Bergerac and Love Letters... it is humane, unpretentiously forthright and has characters who behave like human beings.

It is the story of love, confounded, or almost confounded, by mistaken identity.

Lyuba, an unhappily married provincial tourist guide with vague aspirations to becoming an actress, lifts your spirits or breaks your heart with equal perfection; an older lawyer loves her rather too purely and a brash young lawyer deviously reaps what the older one has sown."

Yet perhaps,we all hope so much,the two who clearly belong together will find their way to a shared and happy place.

Clive Barnes, critic for the New York Post, wrote, "Its unexpectedness is not simply in the reflectiveness and serenity of the writing, but in the odd light it casts on Soviet theatre.

Here is a modern play,its protagonists live our recognizable urban life, take airplanes and talk long distance on the telephone... we almost surprisingly really care about these polite and seemingly stiff lovers lost in some no-man's land, an emotional and psychological time warp of a Russia quite like and yet also quite unlike the world and its people we ourselves know."

Highly recommended.

Area staging.