The Bay at Nice
David Hare's The Bay at Nice is set in a room in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in 1956, where an aging Valentina, once a young student (and possibly lover) of Henri Matisse, has been asked to help authenticate a painting for the museum staff. She is accompanied by her daughter Sophia, a teacher but also an artist, now unhappily married to a Party bureaucrat and desperate to be free of her marriage and 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 grown into a stifled woman in her thirties eager to taste the freedom her mother once enjoyed.
