The Anastasia File

The role of Mrs Manahan, the enigma at the heart of The Anastasia File, could have been written for Alla Mills.  The performance, encompassing post-traumatic nervous breakdown, the poised of a princess and the determination of a stubborn old lady, was an acting tour-de-force.  The only difficulty was the opening scene.  The play starts in 1980, with the elderly Mrs Manahan being interviewed by a detective whose father had interviewed her sixty years previously.  The next scene took us back to her first appearance in 1920.  Thus a flashback of sixty years happened without time for a change of make-up.  The old lady had to be played with just a coat, a headscarf, a stick and a Parkinsonian tremor - features which, seen without preamble, set up a dissonance with the lack of wrinkles.

Thereafter, the story was totally absorbing.  A beaten-up, traumatised young woman is taken in by medical authorities in Berlin after a suicide attempt.  She speaks and reads English, French, German and Russian.  She has intimate knowledge of the Romanovs - the family of the Russian Tsar - but hadn’t they all been murdered in 1918?  As she recovers, she is interrogated, and later befriended by a detective (Bernie Burn).  Their interactions form the nucleus of the play, with the rest of the acting company (Peter Ansell, Steph Dearden, Ryan Burden and Julie Lax) revolving around them, switching roles, costumes and, frequently, nationalities with great rapidity as the unknown woman passed through the hands of medical staff, civil authority, European royalty and American social climbers.

Ultimately, the mystery remains unresolved (which was where it was when Royce Ryton wrote the play in 1978), ending with a beautiful piece of theatrical writing, where the detective sums up, showing the audience how they have been misled because the original case was built on totally unreliable evidence.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.