Theatre: Children of the Sun; The Arrest of Ai Wei Wei

They’re back. Howard Davies and his translator Andrew Upton had a well-deserved hit in 2007 with Gorky’s Philistines at the Lyttelton. Children of the Sun, which Gorky wrote in jail in 1905, is a prophetic allegory that foretells the destruction of Russia’s weak, idle and pretentious upper classes. We’re in a country mansion where a mad professor, stuck in his laboratory, conducts daft experiments while rhapsodising about the redeeming power of science. He stands for the tsar, I think. Around him clusters a gang of artists and drifters who settle into a quadrangle of doomed eroticism. This one loves this one but that one loves this one who loves someone else, and so on. Each is too self-involved to respond to a romantic overture. The result is an atmosphere of infertile onanism.

Howard Davies finds no variation in the mood and he’s happy to let the characters, all shallow monsters, run around the set for two hours bellowing.