Olga Ivanovna is animated, clever, pretty, passionate and trapped in a small town, in a country that views another state, and another language, as holding the key to all elements of high culture. What is she to do? She twirls, she glows, she leaps around, collecting every visiting "star", every scrap of local talent, shining desperately as the life of every party.
You might remember the actress Amy Stratton from Brookside and Coronation Street (as Jenny Gibson and Davina Dawes respectively, so I'm told), but at the Union Theatre in Southwark, South London, now she is Olga, a spectacular, sparkling, but oh-so-fragile Olga. And she's the undoubted shining light of an ambitious production, The Little Dressmaker, which Linnie Redman has adapted from Chekhov's short story "The Grasshopper". This is commonly presented as a morality tale about the dangers of thoughtless following of emotion, but, taking a feminist slant on the story, my sympathies are with Olga.
Perhaps the men in the town have few opportunities, certainly there are few for her friend "the Musician", played here in a technically virtuoso performance by David Laughton (on piano, violin, squeeze-box and balalaika*). Despite his skills, he is reduced to camp posturing and disappointed flouncing, but how much fewer are the chances for women?
You wonder if Olga, underneath the whirl, does indeed have that mysterious quality called "talent". In one important respect she demonstrates it, for she picks an unlikely, bemused, but very smart doctor, Osip Dymov (Jack Reid) as her husband.
We meet the couple at their wedding, where it already looks like mismatch, as she dances frantically with her "artistic" friends and he retreats (in an unusual role reversal) to the kitchen. No genius is required to judge that this is an ill-matched pair, although we only ever get a glimpse into the doctor's mind and a short view of his undoubted passion for his work.
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