In 1979 an extraordinary thing happened at the Edinburgh Festival. A totally unknown theatre company, playing Richard III and The Caucasian Chalk Circle in a language no one in the audience understood, took the critics by storm. It was the Rustavellian Theatre Company from Georgia - Georgia in the USSR - not the American home of peanuts and Presidents! The company played in their own language, Georgian, which has been tenaciously protected in spite of Georgia's absorption into the Russian body politic. The theatrical world was astounded. One man was not astounded, for he had known the Georgians for many years. He is an ex-diplomat, ex-politician, ex-guerrilla fighter, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, and it is he who traces the background of the Rustavellian Theatre Company deep into the Caucasus.