Written by Aleksei Arbuzov in 1975 and directed by Christopher Morahan, Old World explores the connection between a weathered Russian surgeon and his eccentric female patient, who find common ground in memory and desire.

Lidya (Angela Thorne) plays a deliberately unconventional and inconsistent ward in a sanatorium outside Riga (this year's host of the Eurovision Song Contest!). With her outlandish opinions and gaudy sense of dress, the 59-year old Lidya outspokenly befriends her doctor, Rodion Nikolayevich (Tony Britton), a reserved traditionalist with a delicately smouldering and cynical charm. In a fittingly slow-moving plot, the story recounts the deepening relationship between two ageing, flawed and unfulfilled individuals. As they probe one another's past through successive conversations, they simultaneously fill a space in their own dreams of growing old in good company.

Notwithstanding his weakening heart, 65-year old Rodion finds sanctuary in dance with Lidya - as they tipsily step the Charleston and Shimmy outside a restaurant, they collectively recollect their quickly receding pasts. His physical decline is matched by Lidya's failing to last in any of her former marriages. The characters are polar in their principles: Rodion is a staunch traditionalist and loyal widower, while Lidya is deliberately alternative, flighty and contradictory. However, they are matched in their war-scarred hearts, and their wish to be both elusive yet revealing about their pasts.

Well-matched in their performing abilities, Britton and Thorne easily construct a sense of carefree enjoyment and nostalgia for the audience. And whilst perhaps more suited to older spectators, younger, merry crowds can nonetheless appreciate this Senior Citizens' world.

The play's strength lies in the captivating unpeeling of each character's historical layers, revealing their vulnerable and analogous inner wishes and fears. Lidya and Rodion enjoy youthful courtship and mature companionship through lenses of loss, fear and solitude. And, despite a lack in realism of the Eastern European location in which it is set, Old World allows the audience itself to shimmy between the melancholic inevitability of growing old and the exhilaration of discovering it is never too late to find someone to grow old with. Like a hot toddy before bed, this show brings comfort and scope to the fragility and beauty of the ageing human spirit.

E D Withey, 16.06.03