Philistines

Synopsis

Sung at a funeral and a wedding today. The full gamut of the human experience from the ridiculous to the utterly pointless. A restless bunch of young radicals hang out, have sex, dance, drink, moan and philosophise at the home of a prosperous decorator. While Pyotr, a sometime student of law, falls for the lovely, loose-living lodger, his sister carps on about the tedium of life, lusts after Nil - who’s blind to her charms but in pursuit of the servant - and botches her own suicide. Life. People shout, fight, eat and go to bed. When they wake up? They start shouting again. In this house everything fades quickly. Tears, laughter. Everything. Dissipates. The last sounds ringing out over the lake. Then nothing. A banal hum. A household falls to pieces as the personal and political turmoil of pre-revolutionary Russia gathers pace. Gorky’s darkly comic first play of 1902, banned from public performance under the Czarist regime, is seen here in an exuberant new version by Andrew Upton.

Our Review:

31 May 2007

Some slouch fatigued on windowsills watching others take pleasure in birdsong and mushroom-picking, but every character in Maxim Gorky’s Philistines wants desperately to live.

Director Howard Davies turns Gorky’s 1902 play about weary world wanderers into a majestic life-affirming event thanks to Andrew Upton’s restless new translation that overlaps, doubles back then hangs; distracted, dawdling, indecisive, mirthful. Upton matches the play’s lavish philosophising with colloquial turns of phrase and outrageously funny throw-away lines that give Gorky’s perceptive account of an imploding early 20th-century bourgeois Russian family new life.

Ruth Wilson gives a shattering performance as the almost spectral Tanya who haunts the shadows of Bunny Christie’s moody, brown-tiled, right-angled set. With her diffident brother Pyotr (Rory Kinnear) – who has been suspended from university for political activism – Tanya lingers as love evades her and ...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 16 August 2007:

Creating entertainment from a play about terminal boredom must be a major challenge for a director. Howard Davies partially succeeds thanks to some exceptional performances from a very strong ensemble. However, Andrew Upton's ugly modernisation is a huge negative (Justine Mitchell's final flourish is appallingly anachronistic). Upton's crass version gives us a house presided over by Alf Garnett and Carol from Big Brother with two stroppy teenage children, even though they are both meant to be in their 20s and Ruth Wilson and Rory Kinnear are even older than that. The cast deserve great credit for providing such a strong drama and occasional bursts of humour despite these handicaps and I should reserve special mention for Susannah Fielding who I thought was horribly out of her depth in The Rose Tattoo but here provides some welcome optimism amidst the Russian gloom....

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