Theatre review: A bright take on Children Of The Sun, at the Abbey
Fiona Bell and Eavan Gaffney in Children Of The Sun. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★★☆
If Anton Chekhov depicted a world coming to an end amid increasing social and economic turmoil between the 1890s and early 1900s, Maxim Gorky takes things one step further here, in a 1905 play written when the forces of history were beginning to cohere, when what lay in store for Russia was becoming ever clearer.
Children of the Sun, after all, came while Gorky was in prison, and in the wake of the failed Revolution of 1905, which Lenin would call the “great rehearsal”, without which the 1917 October Revolution could not have succeeded.
Hilary Fannin’s new version, directed here for Rough Magic and the Abbey Theatre by Lynne Parker, ends up being rather revolutionary itself. But it begins in a familiarly Chekhovian setting: a busy old-money (though increasingly no-money) rural household, a supposed artists’ retreat, headed by Pavel Protasov, a distracted amateur scientist, a man full of well-digested ideas, but little, seemingly, by the way of real innovation. His world is crumbling, his wife indifferent, his rent overdue, but he is a “man of science” with work to do. Or at least talk endlessly about.
The sense of a teeming household is brilliantly conveyed in Sarah Bacon’s marvellous set, which, across multiple levels, gives us the drawing room, a boffin’s lab, a studio, and a yard all at once. It’s the perfect stage for the hugely enjoyable ensemble playing, as Parker and her cast strike just the right comedic balance.
Fiona Bell is brilliant as ever as Melania, the canny butcher’s widow with designs on Protasov, played with mannered earnestness by Stuart Graham. Aislin McGuckin is his proud, neglected wife, Elena. Rebecca O’Mara as her troubled sister Lisa is a spiky, sardonic commentator. It is she who summons the wild and dangerous world outside: “The crowd. Blood on their faces, blood on the sand.”
Rory Nolan was off book on opening night, drafted in at the last minute to play Chepurnoy, the vet. He carries it off with his usual aplomb. Blithe as any of them, he dismisses Lisa’s visions of doom: the hens are sick, she says, a “plague is coming”, “the dogs are vomiting”. “Dogs like vomiting,” Chepurnoy replies. “Second helpings.”
The upheaval that history will soon visit on the world of this play is, in this production’s second half, visited upon Gorky’s text itself, as it fractures completely in Fannin’s version. After the first act’s jarring, shuddering end, we return to the stage stripped back; radio clips bounce between various devices embedded in its levels, taking us at a rapid clip through the 20th century. Gorky himself appears, hauled over the coals for his more notorious writings as “chief apologists of Stalinist culture”.
We find Protasov rambling in a 1920s mental hospital. Then Melania continues her pursuit of him, but on a 1960s Californian beach. Misha the landlord’s son is still on the up, now trying to buy a football club in the worst “shithole” he can find. Finally, Elena and Chepurnoy are in bed together in some freezing apartment of a bombarded Ukrainian city. Oh, hello, 2024. It’s all rather disorienting, elusively allusive. But perhaps that’s Fannin's point.
Gorky may have fooled himself with talk of “progress”, and progress came pretty soon for these children of the sun. But, as Alexei Navalny himself is roped in as a counterblast, it becomes clear the only “progress”, really, is the ceaseless march of time.
- Until May 11
