'I would like to know what passion is so magnificent it can justify this.'
— Anna, Act One, Scene Three
In his introduction, Brian Friel identifies the novelty of Turgenev's drama,
'where psychological and poetic elements create a theatre of moods and where
the action resides in internal emotion and secret turmoil'.
His lively, comic play describes the course of a passionately eventful summer
month in which Natalya, luminous, anguished and possessed by love, is left
to recover a measure of happiness after her turbulent disquiet.
