Catastrophe will come for them too

Review of Children of the Sun, Hilary Fannin and Maxim Gorky, Abbey Theatre

By Jess Spear

I wasn’t familiar with Gorky’s Children of the Sun when I sat down to watch Hilary Fannin’s version at the Abbey Theatre this past May. This Abbey Theatre version was very enjoyable, spurring me to read up on the original. However, that comparison with the original left me disappointed with some of the changes made in this modern retelling, and feeling like it was a missed opportunity.

The plot of the original is set in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses on a middle-class family so preoccupied by their own personal situations that they don’t even notice the Cholera epidemic sweeping across the country, causing mob violence. Eventually, they are attacked by a mass of angry peasants and one of the characters is shot dead. 

Hilary Fannin’s version

Fannin’s version keeps to the original in that the main characters are utterly self absorbed. Pavel, the scientist patriarch is totally consumed by his experiments. “I am attempting to colonise the last frontier. Time, Elena, time. If we could inhabit different iterations of self, we could undo all the mistakes of the past. Don't you see?” 

Pavel is completely oblivious to the fact that his wife, Elena, is having an affair with the local vet. His sister Liza lives with them and is the most aware of the impending catastrophe growing outside their home. But everyone thinks she’s mad, so they just keep going on and on about her nerves. Go outside and enjoy the fresh air they tell her. It’ll be good for your nerves. "Shut up about my fucking nerves," she responds. 

Who was Gorky?

Maxim Gorky was a famous playwright and writer living at the turn of the 20th century. Like so many in Russia at the time he had an extremely brutal childhood. Orphaned at a young age, he went to live with his grandparents and was beaten by his grandfather. He went to work at the age of 8(!) and held many different kinds of jobs. The bosses beat him just as his grandfather did. One of his workmates introduced him to reading and he decided to become a writer. He took the pen name ‘Gorky’ which means ‘bitter’ and focused his stories on the oppressed masses and their power to change their lives. This endeared him to ordinary Russian people and he became hugely popular.

Gorky’s experience of poverty, cruelty, and oppression also led him to politically align with Marxist revolutionaries and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. When it split in 1903 he sided with the Bolsheviks and was a close ally of Lenin. While never a member of the Bolshevik party, he helped to fund their work.

He wrote Children of the Sun while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress after the Russian Revolution of 1905. He was convicted of inciting violence but was quickly released after protests erupted in Russia and abroad. 

Lost in modernisation

Unfortunately, Fannin completely rewrote the second half of the play to “modernise” it. Rather than have a mob attack and kill Pavel, we are treated to heavy metal music, bright lights and flashes of the future, a clip of a speech from Ronald Regan and scenes of Pavel’s landlord becoming a billionaire football club owner. 

She also decided to use the play to criticise Gorky: for staying in exile from the Soviet Union for so long on the island of Capri and for coming back and reconciling with Stalin. Gorky became the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, which aimed to spread propaganda through literature. 

I don’t know enough about Gorky’s history here to comment on whether this was a fair assessment. But, from the perspective of someone watching the play, it was confusing. 

The audience is never really treated to the climax of the original play - when the angry mob kills Pavel. By omitting this, Fannin’s version changes the play almost entirely. You’re left with the impression that the characters are caught up in their own world, just like us. And that’s kind of it. 

Maxim Gorky, 1905

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the play. It made me laugh out loud. But, I can’t help wishing that Fannin would have kept the final scene because that was the most relevant part of Gorky’s play. 

We live in a world of multiple, ongoing and worsening crises: ecological collapse war, genocide, famine, and the rise of the far right. For the upper middle class, shielded from most of these crises by their privilege and wealth, there are any number of personal intrigues and hobbies to distract. Nonetheless, catastrophe will eventually come for them too.