VENUE LISTING
Lyttelton (National Theatre)also: Lyttelton Loft |
| Address | National Theatre South Bank London SE1 9PX |
| Telephone | 020 7452 3000 |
| Station | Waterloo (LT) |
| Description | Part of the Royal National Theatre, see also Olivier and Cottesloe. Society of London Theatre member. Minicom 020 7452 3009 |
WHAT'S ON
Dates: Opens 16 April 2013. Apr 9,10,11,12,13,15,17,18,23,24,25,30, May 1,2,3,4,10,11,17,18,20, Jun 7,8,10,11,12,18,19,20,27,28,29, Jul 5,6,8,11,12,13 at 19:30. Apr 17,24, May 1,4.11,18,Jun 8,12,19,29, Jul 6,13 Mats 14:15. May 12,19,Jun 9,30,Jul 7,14 Mats 15:00. Apr 16 at 19:00 Prices: £12.00 to £34.00 Cast & Creative Team
Children of the Sun, director Howard Davies' latest production of a Russian classic at the National Theatre (following Philistines, The White Guard and The Cherry Orchard), opened to press in the Lyttelton last night (16 April 2013, previews from 9 April). Maxim Gorky's darkly comic play, adapted by Andrew Upton, is set in Russia as the country rolls towards revolution. Only Liza (Emma Lowndes) suspects their impending doom, while her scientist brother Pavel Protasov (Geoffrey Streatfeild) cares for nothing but his experiments. Children of the Sun runs in rep until 14 July 2013. Michael Coveney Davies and his adaptor, the Australian playwright Andrew Upton (working from a literal translation by Clare Barrett), wrench the text into something more brazen and anachronistic, modern in the sense of being slovenly and outspoken rather than interestingly pointed and fractured… You've only got to look at the RSC translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair and Jeremy Brooks to see how far off-target Upton goes in the name of liveliness and irreverence. And this affects the acting, which is expertly animated but curiously inauthentic… The intelligentsia have become dislocated from the humanity on their own doorstep, an analysis brutally dramatized in the incursion of Yegor the blacksmith's (Matthew Flynn) domestic reality and the insurgency on the street. And the messiness in everyone's lives makes you despair for the future in hindsight if this lot are forging it…For all the shortcomings in the text, the play's definitely worth seeing. Quentin Letts An explosive final scene – kaboom! – does not quite redeem this Gorky play set in pre-revolution Russia. For more than two hours we watch a group of self-regarding intellectuals amuse themselves in the house of scientist Protasov (Geoffrey Streatfeild)... After more than two hours we may ourselves be tempted to break down the gates and beat some sense into Mr Streatfeild’s implausibly unworldly character. So if that does finally occur, will we care?... Characters repeatedly talk over themselves. This aids the pace and seals the idea that Protasov’s house is an impossible place for him to get any work done. Yet I wearied of the extent to which it was done and I found myself wishing at times for a more contemplative tempo… The best scene is one in which these unlikeable fools break ten eggs on purpose. What a succinct expression of waste that is.
 Emma Lowndes as Liza, Geoffrey Streatfield as Protasov & Lucy Black as Melaniya (photo: Richard Hubert Smith) Paul Taylor ...as Howard Davies' rare and brilliantly mordant revival of Children of the Sun indelibly illustrates, Gorky chose to give scathing vent both to his exasperation with the self-involved ineffectuality of Russia's new middle class intelligentsia and to his nagging mistrust of the masses… Davies and his regular designer Bunny Christie once again show their mastery at animating the wide Lyttleton space and Andrew Upton's adaptation, with its calculated anachronisms keeps jolting us out of the complacency of galleried hindsight. With wonderfully well-paced and wrong-footing surges of futile energy amidst the nettled enervation, the production excels at orchestrating the bootless passion of Gorky's personnel who here talk across each and tread on each other's lines in the bitter comedy of the doctrinal altercations and misdirected amatory entanglements… A richly rewarding evening with a literally explosive climax. Henry Hitchings It’s a passionate piece, albeit one that’s slow to ignite… Howard Davies' production conveys Gorky’s mixture of sanity and daring. At first it has a leisurely quality. Bunny Christie’s design is finely detailed yet suggests an expansive world of privilege, with Protasov’s laboratory sitting to one side - a hothouse, display case and potential Tardis. Although the characters’ interactions seem trivial for much of the first two acts, there is a note of volatility even in the most banal moments - a sense of something brewing... Upton has in the past been accused of introducing too much modern phrasing into these plays, and here it’s certainly a surprise to hear Protasov talk about “uni”. Yet he captures Gorky’s comedy and his jagged rhythms, and there’s real complexity in the characterisation. Michael Billington Although the work is no masterpiece, Howard Davies' production and Andrew Upton's new translation prove it's a fascinating document of its time... We're offered a vivid portrait of a society in a state of prerevolutionary chaos, and that emerges strongly from Upton's free adaptation. I'm not crazy about his use of four-letter words to lend the play an urgent contemporaneity, and can't really believe that the bookishly secluded Liza would say "Shut up about my fucking nerves." But Upton heightens the Ibsenite notion that Protasov's chemicals are contaminating the water supply and reorders the events of the last act to bring the play to an explosive conclusion. Siobhan Murphy There’s a fierce crackle to Maxim Gorky’s 1905 play Children of the Sun, written while he was in prison after the first failed Russian revolution… From the start, characters tetchily talk over each other as they stalk round Bunny Christie’s beautifully detailed set… This is Upton and director Howard Davies’s latest joint foray into immersing National Theatre audiences in early 20th-century Russian drama. Together they stop Children of the Sun sliding into enervating high-minded debate by carefully calibrating the various examples of thwarted romance… It coalesces into a nuanced picture of lives and priorities in disarray, which, thanks to sensitive portrayals, means all involved claim a share of your sympathies when everything ends (literally) with a bang. Related Content
Date: 17 April 2013 One of the chief strands in Nicholas Hytner's tenure at the National Theatre has been the fine Russian productions of Howard Davies, and while this revival of Maxim Gorky's scathing 1905 tragi-comedy of the professional middle-classes may not hit the heights of Philistines some years ago, it certainly alerts us to the qualities in a great play. The play was part of the RSC's revelatory Gorky cycle in the 1970s, and was locked into a company style that could embrace sourness and satire without losing the poetry and madness in a circle of friends and family of a visionary chemist, Pavel Protasov (Geoffrey Streatfeild), while the town outside is gripped in a cholera epidemic. But Davies and his adaptor, the Australian playwright Andrew Upton (working from a literal translation by Clare Barrett), wrench the text into something more brazen and anachronistic, modern in the sense of being slovenly and outspoken rather than interestingly pointed and fractured. Protasov, inattentive in his marriage to Justine Mitchell's critical and floundering Yelena, is assailed by a would-be acolyte, Melaniya (Lucy Black), who has not read his books but kissed them. In Gorky, this is jokingly dismissed as a sign of incipient fetishism. Upton goes further, and so does Melaniya: "I licked them, I rubbed them all over my naked body and licked them." Oh dear. Similarly, Protasov's friend, and Melaniya's brother, Boris the Ukrainian vet (Paul Higgins), who is magnetised by his friend's unhinged sister, Liza (Emma Lowndes), suddenly misquotes Hamlet - "To umbrella or not to umbrella" - but misses the point, and the humour, of Gorky's joke about the weather. [WOS_QU@TE]#For all the shortcomings in the text, the play's definitely worth seeing[/WOS_QU@TE] You've only got to look at the RSC translation by Kitty Hunter-Blair and Jeremy Brooks to see how far off-target Upton goes in the name of liveliness and irreverence. And this affects the acting, which is expertly animated but curiously inauthentic. I'm not sure, for instance, that Protasov really is the wide-eyed, deluded idiot Streatfeild projects, and it's hard to relate to the sort of grubby artistic passion conveyed by Yelena's admirer, Gerald Kyd's lubricious Vageen. It's a much more unsettling and restless play than Chekhov's masterpiece of the previous year, The Cherry Orchard, and there's a general thesis that the sort of progress signalled in Protasov's experiments - and echoed in the references to the onset of bottled beer and the motor car - could literally backfire on the society it is serving. The intelligentsia have become dislocated from the humanity on their own doorstep, an analysis brutally dramatised in the incursion of Yegor the blacksmith's (Matthew Flynn) domestic reality and the insurgency on the street. And the messiness in everyone's lives makes you despair for the future in hindsight if this lot are forging it. Bunny Christie has designed another of her classic country houses in the style of a large conservatory, and there are notably fine performances from Paul Hickey as the pawnbroker who's also Protasov's dissatisfied landlord and Maggie McCarthy as his bustling nanny, much more interventionist than Chekhov's old boots. For all the shortcomings in the text, the play's definitely worth seeing, especially as it marks the first Travelex £12 ticket offer (400 of these seats at every performance) this year. Related Content
Reader Reviews: be the first!
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
COMING SOON:
Strange Interlude - Click here for tickets and info
Dates from 28th May 2013
Liola - Click here for tickets and info
Dates from 31st July 2013
