In the early spring of 1995, an international co-production of Ben Jonson's Volpone began its rehearsals in Samara, a city the size of Birmingham, straddling the Volga, 800 miles or so east of Moscow. Alasdair Ramsay, the English director (at that time associated with the Cleveland Theatre Company) invited me to make a set of Commedia masks and direct the mask work for the production. The plan was to rehearse and perform the play in Russia and then tour for four weeks across the North of England. The company had a Russian composer and designer and a guest English actor, the hugely experienced Kate Dove.

The main aim of the project was to share the common and differing theatrical practices in both countries and, hopefully, learn from the experience. It followed a highly successful venture with the same company the previous year when Alasdalr directed Hamlet and a new version of The Canterbury Tales. The financial and logistical arrangements were shared equally by delegations from Yorkshire and Humberside Arts and the Ministry for Culture for the Province of Samara.

Throughout the six weeks of my stay, we were accompanied by a team of highly skilled interpreters. Even the text analysis was overseen by one of the local students of English. The Samara Theatre Company employs over 70 people full time including a team of 4 creative directors, 2 composers, 2 designers, an acting ensemble of 25 actors of all ages including 4 Honoured Artists of Russia.

The theatre itself, housed in a converted cinema, seats 400 and runs a repertoire system of 15 plays which are a mixture of new and classical plays. The company policy is to produce work for young spectators but only one third of its work is designed specifically for children; the rest being aimed at family or teenagers. The company tours across Russia and perform as far afield as Japan and Cuba.

My personal experience of this project proved both frustrating and rewarding. It was extraordinary for instance to find an almost total lack of equipment with which to construct the masks. Fortunately I had brought some materials with me, including the plaster bandage used for making casts of the actor's faces. I quickly discovered that paper and card were at a premium. The actors, for instance, had no copies of the printed scripts, nor would the new translations be printed for the company's use. The actors wrote down their parts in treasured, well-thumbed notebooks, dictated to them by an interpreter during long text analysis sessions led by Alasdair. There was no material to be found in the props/carpenter shop for me to use to shape and sculpt the masks, and basic primary pigments such as yellow or blue were simply unavailable. Eventually, after a day of negotiation, what looked like the remnants of cereal packaging were triumphantly delivered with small quantities of ready mixed floor-cloth paints in tins, appropriated from a local paint studio. The logistics of making the masks proved to be the most demanding part of the whole exercise for me. 28 masks were required for completion in two weeks, the remaining two weeks of my stay being devoted to helping the actors find ways of animating their masked characters.

of the older, more treasured male actors found the alien work with the masks very difficult and were suspicious of the highly disciplined choreography associated with the mask animation, whereas the younger members of the company were wonderfully agile physically and mentally, minds open to the discovery of this extraordinary style of performance. It was a deeply enriching and stimulating artistic exchange. I was privileged to be the learning recipient of a head full of new skills. There was no day when I didn't work to the limit of my experience, and yet I never wearied of it. And of course I was welcomed with an overwhelming Russian embrace of care and hospitality.

(c) David Griffiths 2001 David Griffiths is a member of Yorkshire Playwrights.