Details

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.

Cast/Performers

Rory Kinnear (Pyotr), Ruth Wilson (Tanya), Phil Davis (Vassilly), Conleth Hill (Teterev), Duncan Bell (Perchikin), Mark Bonnar (Nil), Jonathan Bryan (Shyshkin), Marcus Cunningham (Doctor), Susannah Fielding (Polya), Rendah Heywood (Tsvetaeva), Stephanie Jacob (Akulina), Maggie McCarthy (Stepanida), Justine Mitchell (Elena), Mike Aherne (Old Man), Danny Nutt (Ensemble), Charlotte Pyke (Ensemble), Julia West (Old Crone)

Creatives/Company

Author: Maxim Gorky
Adapted by: Andrew Upton
Producer: National Theatre
Director: Howard Davies
Design: Bunny Christie
Lighting: Neil Austin
Music: Dominic Muldowney
Sound: Christopher Shutt