Little substance to Gorky’s shadow in Abbey premiere

CHILDREN OF THE SUN

Abbey, Dublin

MADEIRA

Viking, Dublin

If the classic era of Irish drama is concerned with the revisionist view of the birth of our nation, the Russian equivalent concentrates on a frequently nostalgic examination of the time immediately prior to the wiping out of the old order.

Maxim Gorky’s 1905 Children of the Sun, written while in jail for his part in the abortive revolution of that year, is no exception. A co-production between Rough Magic and the Abbey, it has the eccentric patriarch Protasov, self-absorbed and even close to insanity, concentrating on his pseudo-scientific experiments on the nature of time while his beautiful wife Elena tries to keep life on an even keel for them and their sprawling household of what once has been an artists’ colony.

Except there’s no money, and the hordes are at the gate, about to raze the place and establish a manufacturing plant.

So far, so Russian.

But in Hilary Fannin’s very loose adaptation (more a development, and worked from a literal translation by Olga Taranova) it all falls apart into speculation that one suspects Gorky might have found alien.

After the first act final bang, Protasov is rescued from a (literal) black hole, to find himself restrained in an asylum. Instead, his sister Lisa has become the outside interrogator.

Newly emerged from an asylum in act one – the object of fear and pity in the midst of the debates on the nature of art and love – she interrogates in act two the lumpish Chepurnoy, who morphs into his creator.

Lisa drags the author across the Western world in the latter half of the 20th century where his original characters emerge in various forms as users and victims of society’s stages, during which she demands he justify his socio-political failings. His idealism blinded him to suffering, she claims on our behalf.

It’s a scattergun approach that doesn’t really lead anywhere, dramatically or philosophically. Most of us think tyrannical totalitarianism, whether from the left or the right, is a fairly rotten idea. It doesn’t need a sledgehammer to convince us.

It’s given a spectacularly glamorous setting designed on various levels by Sarah Bacon, with stunning lighting by Sarah Jane Shiels that transforms the decaying country house into an other worldly space-age laboratory of electronic experiment.

Sorcha Ní Fhloinn’s costumes are equally elegant (and, where required, funny). Add in Mel Mercier’s outrageously complex sound composition and Lynne Parker’s audacious directorial concepts, and you have an evening almost bound to appeal to an audience. It is style personified; but when the (admittedly funny in places) text and its assumptions are examined, it’s all rather short on substance.

The cast, though, never put a foot wrong while grabbing individual chances to shine, especially Stuart Graham’s pretentiously self-absorbed Protasov, Aislín McGuckin’s soulful Elena, and Rebecca O’Mara’s Lisa, absorbed in the safety of insanity in a supposedly sane world. Above all, Fiona Bell grabs her glorious comic talent with both hands in the role of the filthy rich vulgarian widow Melania.

Two sets of sisters, one oldish, the other middle-aged, meet separately in the same Dublin cafe. They talk about their childhoods, uneventful as they were. Coincidentally, the mother of the younger pair used to work as a cleaner for the older women in days gone by. Separately, both sets of sisters decide to take a holiday in Madeira, triggered by the recollection of the Madeira cake they used to eat as children.

Trigger (again) an hour of more coincidences than you could shake a credibility gap at, and you have Madeira, Michael J Harnett’s play at the Viking in Clontarf.

One of the elderly sisters dies from cancer early on. She has to, because Deirdre Monaghan also plays one of the younger sisters, the “feisty” one of the pair who has dumped her entirely unsatisfactory husband.

Then the remaining older one meets the feisty younger one to thank her for attending the sister’s funeral, and is told about the younger sister getting her mojo back on the already mentioned holiday. The older sisters are (heavily signalled) Protestants, portrayed almost as weird aliens: the author’s notions of their lifestyle are as hilarious as the supposed speech patterns he gives them.

Geraldine Plunkett, Brenda Brooks and Deirdre Monaghan do their best under uninspired direction from Vinnie McCabe, but it’s all beyond redemption.