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. Some shriek so loud that they risk snapping their vocal chords. Andrew Upton’s translation feels as though he’s hotwired the text and wrapped it around a tree. He can’t find a consistent tone for Gorky’s garrulous duffers. Sometimes they vomit overexcited twaddle. ‘Thus it is, in the confusion of desire, icons are born!’ ‘Happiness is not possible unless you praise truth!’ At other times, they swap tower-block harassments. ‘Are you a moron?’ ‘Shut up about my fucking nerves.’
A sketchy plot adds some last-minute action. Professor Brainstorm manages to poison the local water supply and this triggers a yokels’ uprising. Armed bumpkins storm the mansion and go from room to room sticking knives in the residents’ throats. At which point, a shout of ‘up the revolution!’ sprang involuntarily to my lips.
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