 Based on Bolton's 1954 English adaptation of Marcelle Maurette's play "Anastasia" and the subsequent 1956 film adaptation of the same name, it focuses on Anya who, when discovered in a Berlin psychiatric facility in 1925 by taxi driver Bounine, a former Cossack general in Czarist Russia, claims to be Anastasia, the supposedly murdered youngest daughter of Emperor Nicholas II.A number of fictional elements, including a romantic triangle involving Anya, Bounine, and his mistress Genia and the addition of a comical character, café proprietor Katrina, weakened the plot of the true story.It also continued to perpetuate the notion that the Dowager Empress had met Anya in real life, when in fact the two never crossed paths.