by David Hare
seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 13 April 2019
Richard Eyre directs Penelope Wilton as Valentina Nrovka, Ophelia Lovibond as her daughter Sophia, David Rintoul as Sophia's lover Peter and Martin Hutson as an assistant curator at the Hermitage in this play about authenticating a possible Matisse painting left to the museum by an emigre aristocrat, entwined with the difficult relationship between mother and daughter.
The situation is rather artificial, Sophia having thought that the occasion of her mother's invitation to the museum to see the painting might be the occasion for announcing her intention to leave her husband and children and live with the much older and widowed Peter, for which she needs funds for the divorce proceedings. This allows us to see Valentina from a number of different angles - impatient with museums, dismissive of much modern art, contemptuous of modern ideas of freedom and self-fulfilment, and therefore extremely abrasive with her daughter. Behind this steely exterior, expressed in well-turned speeches of frightening social and moral put-downs (rather like Lady Bracknell in deadly earnest) is a history of repressed anguish and unacknowledged disappointment - Valentina was a gay young thing in Paris, a model and possibly lover of Matisse, shut out by the Master's admission that he had no time for love, and determined, with a baby to look after, to return to Russia to give order and structure to her life no matter the cost.
