The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts is a political drama about the Soviet Union set in 1930, written by British playwright F. L. Lucas in 1931,[1] and first staged in 1932.
He shares the room with Grigori Orlov, ejected from his chair at the university for a "reactionary" refusal to give a Marxist slant to his literature lectures.
Vladimir gives permission (Orlov son might perhaps be pressured to write positively about the USSR when he returns to London) and allows Grigori to accompany them.
Grigori, to save his son, tells Elizaveta what he found in her father's pocket-book: Leonti has been smuggling goods across the nearby Polish frontier (an "anti-Soviet" activity).
After delivering Vladimir's funeral oration offstage (which we hear), a tearful Vera enters to say goodbye to Andrey before he is carried off to Kiev.
[2] The first dramatisation of the Soviets on London's West-end stage, it was directed later that year at the Garrick by Leon M. Lion, with designs and décor by Robert Lutyens.
The first night in London was attended by some serving members of the British Cabinet, among them Walter Runciman, by prominent MPs, and by various ambassadors to the UK.
To it was added a long Introduction, 'The Gospel According to St Marx', in which Lucas discussed the shortcomings of Soviet Communism and defended his play against the reviewers' criticism.
The original manuscript of the play is in the Leon M. Lion Collection, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, USA.
[9] The Bear Dances was an attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at the start of a decade in which Cambridge University (in Lucas's words) "grew full of very green young men going very Red".
[10] Though he strives for objectivity (the play was vetted by an ex-member of the British Embassy in Moscow[11]), with Vera and Vladimir acting as spokesmen for the new order, Lucas's verdict on the Soviet system is damning.
"[13] Despite approval of its subject-matter[3] ("Any study of conditions in Soviet Russia is certain at the moment to command attention," noted The Spectator[14]) and praise for the directing, acting, and designs, the reviewers found The Bear Dances "overladen with pamphleteering argument, on both sides".
[15] The Stage conceded that the trial scene, the fatal firing, the bargaining with Levine, and the escape "were all more or less interesting and effective",[16] as did Harold Hobson in one of his earliest play-reviews.
Here he recalled his dismay at being shown at Bletchley Park, months before the fall of Berlin in 1945, a confidential map of the areas of Germany that Roosevelt had agreed to leave in Russian hands.