Children of the Sun review

It comes as quite a shock to realise that Rough Magic theatre company has reached the ripe old age of 40: its output, outlook and vision remain as fresh and challenging as at its formation by a group of Trinity College Dublin graduates. Under the artistic direction of co-founder Lynne Parker, who here directs with terrific aplomb, it has grown into one of Ireland’s leading independent producers, with a reputation for tangential, probing and frequently mischievous approaches to mainstream theatrical tradition.

Its signature ensemble playing style frequently wraps itself around a mix of new Irish writing, reimagined classics and contemporary international plays. This piece, a flamboyant, ironic reworking of Maxim Gorky’s portrait of privileged insouciance by Hilary Fannin, suits the company perfectly. Casting a beady eye across Europe’s past and present, Fannin deftly flags up the fact that, when it comes to the cyclical nature of history, there is nothing new under the sun, no lessons learned. The only constants are art and what the French poet Charles Baudelaire described as “the strangeness of beauty”.

Gorky wrote the play while in prison in 1905, when protestors, demonstrating peacefully against his incarceration, were gunned down by tsarist troops. Even when confronted by state-sanctioned brutality, the affluent elite ignored the writing on the wall until it was too late and the social order that had for so long insulated and protected them was torn asunder.

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