The journey of the central characters is both their personal story and a metaphor. On a personal level, it explores just what matters in life, what you are prepared to endure – and do – to achieve it, and what happiness it brings. How strong is love? How powerful are family ties?

On another level, the story explores the tension between individual aspirations and shared community responsibility, between the apparent freedom of liberal capitalism and the shackles of communism. It is set against the background of the cold war – the clash between the two great ideologies of the 20th century. It now seems as if that struggle is over. That capitalism won and communism lost. Russians and Chinese are queuing up to embrace capitalism.

And yet... millions of Americans voted for President Bush because of a sense of shared identity (and shared fear?) – and when the tsunami hit southeast Asia, so many millions of people in the victorious indivdualistic west were moved by a sense of shared pity that governments have been galvanized into uncharacteristically ‘generous’ activity.

In the character of Beria, there is the idea of the two apparently opposing ideologies – individual aspirations and the sacrifice of the individual to the community good – taken to extreme in a single mind. Beria was so fanatically committed to the defense of communism – the common good of the people – that he was prepared to send millions to their deaths to protect it – and yet so fanatically egotistical that his own personal ambitions and desires made him a monster of another kind.

In Anya and Louis, the piece explores the idea that it is human needs, human empathy, and love that really drive us – and the idea that for all the freedom we have in the western world there is a yawning sense of emptiness and lack of fulfilment which romantic love alone cannot fulfil.