Five Reasons to See … Anastasia at Pushkin House
Walking Thoughts have returned to Pushkin House with their site-specific production of Marcelle Maurette’s classic Anastasia, before transferring it to Russia next year.
Following a critically acclaimed, sell-out run in 2009, this intimate performance of explores the trauma, suffering and loss not only of a royal family but of a Russian generation.
Here, the company give us five reasons to go along…
1. The Cast
A strong cast of fourteen actors ranging in ages from twenty to nearly ninety, including Eileen Nicholas who recently won the best actress award at the Kiev film festival for the film Bomber.
2. The Company
The Russian press have called the theatre company Walking Thoughts “English Theatre with a Russian Soul” It is a theatre company that wants to combine the best of British and Russian theatre traditions. The Evening Standard gave the production four stars describing it as “a richly rewarding treat”
3. The History.
Nearly 100 years after the Russian Royal family was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad their story continues to haunt and fascinate us. It is not that their deaths are any more tragic than the millions of other Russians who died during the Revolution, civil war or subsequent Stalinist purges, just that the photographs that remain showing four children on the brink of life seem to represent the vicious brutality of a Revolution that set Russian against Russian and wiped out so many innocent lives.
4.The Venue
Pushkin House is a beautiful Georgian townhouse set in the heart of Bloomsbury, a hidden secret and heart of the Russian cultural scene in London. It has been turned into a theatre for a month, transformed into a townhouse in 1928 Berlin where four Russian exiles plotted to use a disturbed young girl to gain access to Tsars millions by passing her off as the daughter who survived the Bolshevik firing squad.
5. Russia
Walking thoughts will be taking the play Anastasia to Russia in 2013 as part of the celebrations to mark 400 years of the Romanov dynasty – so take the chance to catch in UK soil first!
Anastasia runs at Pushkin House until 21 April 2012
