03:36PM, Friday 23 May 2025
Photo: Simon Vail
It’s a strange thing about humans that we like to know the answer but we also love a mystery – and of course there’s a tension between the two.
That tension provides the drama in The Anastasia File, which explores the story of Anna, who turns up in an asylum in Berlin with beautiful manners and no papers to show her identity. Could she be Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, supposedly killed along with the rest of the Imperial family by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg?
A miracle (we love a miracle) and smuggled treasure (we love treasure) rolled into one.
It begins with an old lady telling a young detective that she knows who she is, then we roll back and roll through the questions that have been fired at her for decades.
Two years after the Russian revolution and the slaying of the Romanovs, a woman is pulled from a canal and is placed in an institutional facility.
She has clear signs of internal and external trauma, and cowers when questioned. Medics and police are intrigued and gradually a picture emerges, languages, deportment, allusions to immense privilege, this stray stranger might just be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Some are deeply convinced, this Anna stays consistent even when her uncle denies the timing of his visit to Russia, some say the opposite, but perhaps their vision has been clouded by concern for the vast Romanov fortune placed in a Bank of England vault
The mystery unfolds crossing countries, locations and decades using a simple set of chairs and lighting scenes plus some rather beautiful projections of a tree and leaf patterns, the Romanov crest and a church’s rose window.
A cast of four play multiple characters. We see Simon Shepherd as the likeable detective – and his police inspector son, Rosie Thomson tackles nursing roles and Russian relations with aplomb, Ashley D Gayle plays Anna’s German doctor and a host of Russian roles, Jenny Seagrove has just the one character but it’s a humdinger: scared, proud, and sometimes-imperial Anna.
It was intriguing, thought-provoking and engaging piece of theatre and might just leave you with more questions than answers...
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Left inset: Anna Friel. Photo by RedCarpetReport via Wikimedia Commons.
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