..CAST
 
Alan Howard:
Norman Rodway:
John Shrapnel:
Carmen Du Sautoy:
Sinead Cusack:
Natasha Parry:
 ....Chepurnoy
....Protassov
....Vaguin
....Elyena
....Lisa
....Melanya

Gorky's 'CHILDREN OF THE SUN' had its British premiere at the Aldwych Theatre.

Daily Telegraph
By JOHN BARBER

THERE is undoubtedly a good sort of a play buried somewhere in "The Children of the Sun" the Maxim Gorky tragi-comedy of 1905 at the Aldwych.
......But whereas Chekhov wrote of Russia's discontented middle-class with a fine and subtle wit, Gorky used a meat-hook, and Terry Hands's production drags out all that is over-emphatic, repetitive and inflated in Gorky's work.
......Of course Gorky brought more sarcasm to his laughter, and more social indignation to his portraits of the underprivileged. But he too is perceptive.


Natasha Parry, John Shrapnel, Carmen Du Sautoy,
Norman Rodway & Valerie Lush
There is warm humour in Norman Rodway's absurd amateur chemist, a likeable dolt whose silly test-tubes drive his neglected wife (Carmen Du Sautoy — excellent) to toy with a lover, and drives to distraction the rich, ramshackle widow so touchingly brought to life by Natasha Parry.
......And Alan Howard, in a performance of immense charm, discovers great humanity in the cynical vet who, when rejected by Sinead Cusack's neurotic girl, simply hangs himself.
......But the drama is woefully short of incident. Gorky keeps whipping up these people into rowdy declarations – often out of character – about the Children of the Sun who will create some vague splendid future for the world, and who totally for get the impoverished masses banging at their gates and the new industrialists avid to buy them all up.
Norman Rodway & Carmen Du Sautoy

John Shrapnel, Alan Howard, Carmen Du Sautoy,
Sinead Cusack & Norman Rodway

.
The director who has conjured up so many good performances cannot see when a scene has made its point, an actor has shot his bolt, and his author has overwritten. The folly of the foolish is fired at us like a cannon. So is the shallowness of the idealists' vanity, and the historical portent in the workers' restlessness.
......The translation is by Jeremy Brooks and Kitty Hunter Blair, Chris Dyer's spare sets do well. But let no one think this is a production to set beside David Jones's "Summerfolk" by the same author and company.

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