PRODUCTIONS

A Family Affair is a scathing farce about the Russian merchant class, where the swindler is swindled and every cross is a double cross.

Wonderfully boisterous, scurrilously funny and bitingly irreverent, A Family Affair, adapted by multi-award-winning playwright Nick Dear, is a stinging play about greed, corruption and the desire to climb the social ladder whatever the cost.

When written by Alexander Ostrovsky in 1850, A Family Affair caused an absolute uproar, and caused this remarkable and hilarious satire to be banned for more than thirty years. The government censor was heard to cry ‘The characters are first rate villains, the dialogue is filthy, the entire play is an insult to the Russian merchant class!’. What better recommendation can there be for this play?

Serdar Bilis

"Nick Dear’s adaptation is full of dry and jagged wit...has a sharp eye and a slick intelligence…an enjoyably manic energy to Bilis’s production, with Jonathan Coyne’s brusque Bolshov and Sally Leonard’s vain, petulant Olimpiada particularly entertaining…its sour aftertaste offers a pleasing antidote to more saccharine festive fare."

Sam Marlowe, The Times

"Serdar Bilis's cracking production gives the lie to Dostoevsky's view that Ostrovsky's work was 'too Russian for Europe"

Clare Brennan, Observer on Sunday

Philip Arditti, Jane Bertish, Jonathan Coyne, Sally Leonard, Rosemary McHale, Eve Pearce, Rotimi Pearce, Glyn Pritchard.

Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard