A European Playwright Writing In English
Madame Polina
Madame Polina tells the story of the 19th century love affair between the Russian novelist Count Ivan Turgenev and the Spanish/French opera singer Pauline Viardot. The relationship was a classic menage à trois, since Pauline's husband was both her impresario, and Turgenev's French translator. The kernel of the menage à trois (which Pauline wants to conceal, and Turgenev wishes to expose), is the paternity of her child Paul, and, as an attempt to force the issue, Turgenev presents Pauline with his illegitimate daughter by a peasant girl, Paulinette, to look after. Notice the proliferation of names beginning with Paul... here, and it's all true ...
This play is also a tale of revolution, the first act centring around the revolutions of 1848, the second around the Paris Commune of 1870/71. The link is that Turgenev when young was a close friend of the world's first terrorist and anarchist Prince Mikhail Bakunin, with whom he shared rooms when they were both studying at Berlin University in the mid-1840s. Which is where the play begins...
Cast: 5 men, 5 women, plus extras!
Production history: Edinburgh Festival 1984 (earlier version, under the title Viardot), Genesius Guild, New York, 2003 (revised version, under the title Madame Viardot)
