Production Information

Review / Hampstead and Highgate Express / 27.2.98

Review / Time Out / 18.2.98

Review / Times / 14.2.98

Review / Guardian / 14.2.98

Review / London Evening Standard / 13.2.98

Review / Daily Mail / 20.2.98 (below)

Magnificent revivals this week of two modern classics, both dating from the Twenties, which have been pumped full of teeming life and irresistible passion...............Bulgakov's Flight was banned by the Soviet authorities in 1927 before it even opened but is now part of an extraordinary output rapidly gaining in popularity and renown.'Here come the Reds, here come the Whites. It was like a dreadful dinner party, with a hostess anxious to show off her wine cellar'.That is how one character recalls the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution as the Bolsheviks drive the Czarist White Army off the Crimean Peninsula in 1920.

Howard Davies's production uses the full scale and scope of the Olivier. Alan Howard in coruscating form as a cruel and capricious head of staff, and Kenneth Cranham, equally superb as his unflappable general in the field.

Rarely has a play so powerfully represented the horrors of a civil war and the hardships of enforced exile with such irony, humour and savage intimacy.

And the epic, tragi-comic scaledoes not dwarf the central love story of a dreamy academic (Michael Mueller) and the wife (Abigail Cruttendon) of a government minister. A night of exquisite high drama, and the just revelation of a masterpiece.

Michael Coveney

Daily Mail. 20.2.98.