Anastasia is attempting to look regal in her mother’s tiara and her father’s military medals. Beneath her tunic, however, she wears no trousers. The look reflects her state of mind: in her head, she is the only remaining member of the imperial Romanov family, a survivor of a Bolshevik firing squad, but her story is as flimsy as her legs are bare.
In this entertaining lunchtime play by Jonny Donahoe – he of Jonny and the Baptists fame – Anastasia keeps finding herself in the same Berlin police station explaining how she has ended up at the bottom of a canal again.
She is faced by Franz, an empathetic policeman with a plain-speaking love of facts. For all her fantastic claims, she fascinates him. Brittle and elegant, she is like one of the ceramic swans in his secret collection. Claiming to be in love with a man named Tchaikovsky, she is a human addition to his private Swan Lake.
The story is based on the real case of Anna Anderson who showed up in 1920s Germany, claiming to be the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. Despite her time spent in Dalldorf psychiatric hospital, she was believed by many.
Although amused by the improbability, the eccentricity and the flights of fancy, Donahoe has a nuanced take on mental illness, as you would expect from the original star of Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing. So what if the real Anastasia was killed with the rest of her family? If the delusion helps protect a vulnerable woman, what harm could it do?
All this is delightfully handled by Kirsty McDuff and Chris Forbes in a light-footed production by Liz Carruthers. Where McDuff is sprightly and elastic, Forbes is all stiffness and restraint. With her exuberance in contrast to his earnestness, she is the one making the most of the hand she has been dealt.
• At Òran Mór, Glasgow, until 5 October and on tour until 19 October.
