Wild Honey (Modern Plays)

Oh, Misha, it's terrible to be an educated woman. An educated woman with nothing to do. What am I here for? Why am I alive? They should make me a professor somewhere, or a director of something ... If I were a diplomat I'd turn the whole world upside down ... An educated woman ... And nothing to do.

Village schoolmaster Mikhail Vasilyevich has it all: wit, intelligence, a comfortable and respectable life in provincial Russia, and the attentions of four beautiful women - one of whom is his devoted wife… As summer arrives and the seasonal festivities commence, the rapidly intensifying heat makes everyone giddy with sunlight, vodka – and passion.

Michael Frayn's comedy of errors, drawn from Chekhov's untitled and posthumously discovered early play, is a tale of nineteenth-century Russian life replete with classic misunderstandings, irrepressible desires and nostalgia for a vanishing world.

Wild Honey received its premiere in the National Theatre's Lyttelton space, London, on 19 July 1984. This edition was published for the revival at the Hampstead Theatre in December 2016.