Dance of defiance

This passionate and colourful production exudes the warmth and vibrancy of Cuba at the same time as it articulates its political evils.

Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Nilo Cruz has poignantly brought to life the psychological tortures experienced by the writer Maria Elena Cruz Varela, who was first imprisoned, and then kept under house-arrest after she challenged Fidel Castro in a document that detailed everything she thought was wrong with his regime.

She was seized from her house in November 1991, by state security agents who beat her and her coterie of fellow intellectuals in front of her daughter. The drama focuses on how her life was constricted after she was released from the state prison and returned to her home under strict surveillance.

Although this is a play about oppression, it is impossible to enter the auditorium without feeling as if you have stumbled into a bohemian front-room in Cuba. On Nick Barnes's lavish set, ornamental palm trees, generous drapes, and a low sofa all provide the backdrop to a young girl who sits and plays a decaying grand piano as unself-consciously as if she had only the cobwebs to watch her.

The obvious painful paradox of this idyllic scene is that nothing this girl or her sister ever do is unobserved. In Paola Dionisotti's subtly poetic production, both Catalina Botello (Maria) and Eva Alexander (Sophie) demonstrate the insidiousness of a torture that seems to grant its victims access to their own lifestyle, but laughs at their need for liberty.

This play would become much stronger with more historical detail, but it nonetheless excels in investigating how political oppression destroys when it becomes deeply personal. The scenes where Lieutenant Portuondo (Robert Cavanah) reads Maria's husband's letters to her sizzle with anguished sensuality - and Cavanah himself is superb, fuming first with suppressed desire, and then with bullying postcoital disappointment.

Dionisotti - who won the Evening Standard Best Actress Award in 2000 - also brings out the sense of the conspiratorial love and sisterly solidarity that creates a foundation for survival. Alexander's accomplished pianoplaying rounds off a vibrant emotional mix.

Two Sisters