The Stage
Review by William McEvoy

Mon 29 October 2007
Old World

Set in a sanatorium in August 1968 on the Riga coast, Aleksei Arbuzov's two-hander is about middle-aged love, loss and trust. It charts the relationship between a widower doctor, Rodion Nikolayevich and his colourful, young-at-heart new patient, Lidya Vasilyevna.

The production amply captures the autumnal feel of Arbuzov's gentle love story, with rain falling and leaves shimmering in the garden. Andy Burden creates some beautiful sequences with closely observed direction, allowing the story to develop at its own pace and rhythm and keeping the dialogue alive with controlled and precise work from his actors.

As Rodion, Kevin Colson is gruff and guarded until Lidya helps him discover his youth through dancing the Charleston or eating out in fancy restaurants. Ros Liddiard gives Lidya a skittish coquettishness that shifts into something more melancholy and fragile later.

Arbuzov's play has no grand finale or tight plot. Instead, we follow the ebbs and flows of growing intimacy and emotional barriers being dismantled as the couple come to rely on one another more and more. The addition of Arvo Part's exquisite violin music between scenes helps make this a mature, reflective and ultimately moving production.

Production information

By:                                          Aleksei Arbuzov, translated by Ariadne Nicolaeff

Management:             Prime Theatre

Director:                     Andy Burden

The Courtyard, London
October 23-November 18

Time Out London
Review by Robert Crowe

Mon Oct 29 2007
Old World

Lying belly-deep inside what used to be Hoxton Public Library, and so recently redecorated that inhalation is tantamount to solvent abuse, two original spaces have been developed for the relocated Courtyard Theatre. In the larger of these - a standard black oblong, seating 150 - a sanatorium resident and her doctor begin a relationship which tests our patronising perceptions of what later lovelife is and ought to be. An offbeat choice to showcase a new theatre, maybe, but a canny one.

Written in 1975 and set seven years earlier in what would become Latvia, Aleksei Arbuzov's two-hander 'Old World' remains fresh because we are yet to clear the conceptual hurdle that the elderly are just normal people in slightly less fashionable skin. Certainly, death is ever-present, not least in a lithic set design which brings to mind mortuary slabs and outsize headstones. But age shall not weary them (unless they let it) and this is a feature-length carpe diem, a wonderful endorsement of Prime Theatre's raison d'être: to provide opportunities for senior actors. It is perhaps predictable that the female character represents the 'corrupting' force, but nonetheless Kevin Colson (Rodion) and Ros Liddiard (Lidya) are thoroughly convincing as the uptight, unravelling medic and the winsome bohemian convalescent respectively. Not so much growing old disgracefully -  embarrassingly gummy snogging (or worse) is mercifully absent - as growing old without abandoning what life's worth living for. The blend of sincerity and joie de vivre with which the two performers commit to this forms the expressive core of a sustainedly affecting, unsentimental piece of drama. Maybe the old ones are the best.

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Time Out London

Hampshire Chronicle
1st November 2007
Review by John Mayle
 
Old World

This play is a gem. At each turn of the story, another facet reflects a light from yet a deeper layer of the two lives that we watch becoming intertwined.    

When Rodion Nikolayevich (Kevin Colson), the crusty, old director of a sanatorium in Soviet Latvia first meets Lidya Vasilevya (Ros Liddiard), a coquettish, romantic rebel of a patient, the tensions are palpable. Painful pauses betray the emotions driving each of them inexorably towards each other. Love, war, loss and denial are the forces that have driven them to survive in their contrasting worlds. We feel the conflicts that each wrestles with as they gradually reveal their long and complex lives. Yet as each facet is tenderly exposed, it is those same forces that pull them closer together.  

The result is moving and sensual without ever becoming heavy handed. We are gently led beyond a simple romance, through the struggles of Soviet history, to eternal questions about love, loss, age, redemption and death. Amid a minimal but versatile set that ingeniously conveys the faded grandeur of Riga, the two actors superbly convey both the humour and the pain of that journey.  

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The Independent

 Kevin Colson 

 Ros Liddiard