An HB Ensemble Production
Playwright: David Hare
Director: Amy Wright
Cast: Stephanie Braxton, Michael Epp, Elizabeth Grey, Austin Pendleton
Bay at Nice was performed April 14th – 23rd
Synopsis: This play is set in a room in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in 1956. An ageing Valentina, once a young student (and possibly lover) of Henri Matisse is accompanied by her daughter Sophia, a teacher but also an artist, desperate to be free of her marriage and to start a new life, for which she needs her mother’s approval and financial assistance. The result is a battle of wills between the two women, one an ex-bohemian, who left the freedom of Paris to raise her fatherless child in a repressive Russia, and the daughter, now a stifled woman in her thirties eager to taste the freedom her mother once enjoyed. ‘The Bay of Nice’ was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in September 1986.