Nobody ever said the revolution was going to be tidy. This week I spent time in two worlds, separated by more than half a century and thousands of miles, in which the tremors of cataclysmic change were causing folks to make thorough messes of their lives. In the case of Maxim Gorky’s “Children of the Sun†(1905), at the National Theater, the setting is a roomy estate at the edge of a village in imperial Russia; in Pam Gems’s “Dusa, Fish, Stash and Vi†(1976), at the Finborough Theater, it’s a cramped London apartment in which four women consider lives with and without men.
But whatever the real estate involved, these were clearly times for tearing down the house, without any solid notion of a blueprint for a new one. If the plays themselves are rather a mess too, perhaps that’s appropriate. They were created during the eras of upheaval they portray, and shaped with a passion, anger and confusion that feels personal to their authors.
“Children of the Sun,†written while Gorky was in prison in St. Petersburg for anti-czarist activity, seethes with impatience with the cosseted intellectuals and aesthetes at its center. Chief among these is Protasov, a visionary scientist buried so deep in his research that he neglects to see that his household - which includes his neurasthenic sister and restless artist wife â€" is falling apart.
Even more damningly, he fails to realize that citizens of the town where he lives believe he is poisoning them with his experiments. Explosions, figurative and literal, are obviously in the offing. And the play, like its characters, exists in a state of addled anticipation of the big boom.
The waiting can be weary in Howard Davies’s expansive production of “Children,†even though I was glad to have the opportunity to see this seldom performed work. Like Mr. Davies’s enthralling 2007 interpretation of Gorky’s “Philistines†at the National, “Children†has been translated (quite colloquially) by Andrew Upton and designed (very handsomely) by Bunnie Christie. Yet while “Philistines,†too, portrayed a world of squabbling bourgeoisie on the eve of its destruction, it pulsed with a sense of individual, acutely observed life.
“Children,†in contrast, often feels bluntly drawn and archetypal, and it invites disadvantageous comparison to other plays of the same era. Its sets of self-sabotagingly tentative lovers bring to mind Chekhov’s “Three Sisters†and “Cherry Orchard,†while its depiction of a misunderstood and misunderstanding man of intellect evokes Ibsen’s abrasive doctors and master builders.
The predominantly young cast for “Children,†led by Geoffrey Streatfeild as Protasov, is appropriately intense. But aside from Paul Higgins as the hopelessly hopeful suitor of Protasov’s sister (Emma Lowndes), the performers never achieve the fine-grained idiosyncrasy that was so compellingly evident in “Philistines†(which memorably featured Rory Kinnear, currently doing a fabulous Iago for the National). I suspect that the fault here lies more in the play that in its players.
“Dusa, Fish, Stash and Vi†has a greater feeling of immediacy than “Children†does, though it’s a similarly imperfect play. Immediacy is inevitable at the Finborough, a closet-sized space that places audiences cheek by jowl with performers. Such claustrophobia is suitable for this early work by Gems, who died in 2011 and is best known for the biodramas “Piaf†and “Stanley†(about the painter Stanley Spencer).
The title characters of “Dusa, Fish, Stash and Vi,†directed by Helen Eastman, are flatmates of widely varied provenance, problems and tastes. Dusa (Sophie Scott) is a fashionable young mother of two, whose children have been abducted by her estranged husband. Fish (Olivia Poulet) is a union organizer from the upper-middle classes. Stash (Emily Dobbs) is a country lass who is working her way toward college as a prostitute, while Vi (Helena Johnson) is a crazy, mixed-up waif with an eating disorder, who rarely leaves the apartment.
You may wonder how these strangely assembled characters ever got together, and no full explanation is provided. Principally, they seem to exist to embody a range of problems faced by women in the early days of feminism, when the traditional roles of the sexes are under siege. (This production has been staged to commemorate the centenary of the death of the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison.)
Gems’s script proposes using a set that is “not naturalistic†and “neutral in atmosphere,†which might have given the play a more abstract, poetic quality, in the manner of Caryl Churchill’s history-scrambling “Top Girls.†As it is, the mid-1970s set and costumes designed by Katie Bellman for this production have an almost anthropological specificity, which makes you take the characters and their plights more literally than Gems probably intended.
But as they advise, comfort, chastise and clash with one another, these actresses provide a lively, appealingly sloppy group portrait of women trying to figure out their placed in an era of sexual flux. Like the Russians of “Sun,†these Britons know their world is rapidly changing, but into what? And the free-for-all aspect of Gems’s script matches the prevailing sense of social disarray.
Interestingly, the text on sale at the Finborough re-sets “Dusa†in contemporary times, with an appropriate adjustment of cultural references. (An allusion to Robert Redford, for example, has been changed to Ewan McGregor.) Ms. Eastman’s production returns the play to the decade in which it was written. But the suggestion still hovers that the uncertainties faced by its characters are far from being resolved, that the women’s revolution is the enduring stuff of daily life.
