John Farndon

Anya begins in the last days of World War 2 in which the Russian people have suffered terribly. (Young men are dying)

An American mission (Lighten up Mr Stalin) to negotiate with the Russians over the defeat of Japan brings Louis to Moscow where he meets Anya.

No longer quite young, they fall quickly and deeply in love, (When I was young) and their romance blooms amidst the celebrations for victory in Europe. (Listen can’t you hear; Take off that uniform soldier)

But this is Stalin's Russia, the Russia of the Gulags and the fatal knock at midnight, and such a liaison is dangerous and forbidden.

And Lavrenty Beria, (Rule like iron) Stalin’s righthand man – a man said to have the blood of millions on his hands – has his eye on Anya.

Louis is forced to leave the country – knowing neither that Anya is soon to have their child, Katya. (A brief affair)

Nor that Anya has been snatched by the NKVD, tortured and sent to Siberia, leaving the child with her sister. Seven years in prison sees Anya weak but unbroken – dreaming of Louis and yearning for her child. (Seven Years Older)

Meanwhile, Louis’s dreams of fame as a writer have faded in the poisonous atmosphere of McCarthyite America. (Shooting pinkoes)

At last, though, Stalin and Beria both fall and Anya is released. Mother and daughter painfully rebuild their shattered lives. But Anya still misses Louis, and Katia longs for the Father she never knew. (Where are you?)

At grave risk, at the height of the Cold War, Katia contacts Louis with the help of an American journalist.

But time has not stood still. Neither Louis nor Anya are the same – and they and Katya face dangerous journeys and heartrending choices. (What shall I wear?)

The journey of the central characters is both their personal story and a metaphor. On a personal level, it explores just what matters in life, what you are prepared to endure – and do – to achieve it, and what happiness it brings. How strong is love? How powerful are family ties?

On another level, the story explores the tension between individual aspirations and shared community responsibility, between the apparent freedom of liberal capitalism and the shackles of communism. It is set against the background of the cold war – the clash between the two great ideologies of the 20th century. It now seems as if that struggle is over. That capitalism won and communism lost. Russians and Chinese are queuing up to embrace capitalism.

And yet... millions of Americans voted for President Bush because of a sense of shared identity (and shared fear?) – and when the tsunami hit southeast Asia, so many millions of people in the victorious indivdualistic west were moved by a sense of shared pity that governments have been galvanized into uncharacteristically ‘generous’ activity.

In the character of Beria, there is the idea of the two apparently opposing ideologies – individual aspirations and the sacrifice of the individual to the community good – taken to extreme in a single mind. Beria was so fanatically committed to the defense of communism – the common good of the people – that he was prepared to send millions to their deaths to protect it – and yet so fanatically egotistical that his own personal ambitions and desires made him a monster of another kind.

In Anya and Louis, the piece explores the idea that it is human needs, human empathy, and love that really drive us – and the idea that for all the freedom we have in the western world there is a yawning sense of emptiness and lack of fulfilment which romantic love alone cannot fulfil.