Afterplay

A middle-aged man and woman have a chance encounter in a down-at-heel Moscow tea-room sometime in the 1920s. As they fall into conversation, the contours of their lives are revealed. She has been left with the care of a large, loss-making estate once managed by Vanya, her beloved but ineffectual Uncle. He is the brother of three sisters from the provinces who never quite made it to Moscow. Brian Friel’s audacious, Chekhovian epilogue is a masterful, intricate, funny and touching one-act play revisiting two characters from Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya.