Philistines

Howard Davies directs Philistines by Maxim Gorky, in a new version by Andrew Upton.

The production will be designed by Bunny Christie, with lighting by Neil Austin, music by Dominic Muldowney and sound by Christopher Shutt. The cast includes Rory Kinnear as Pyotr and Ruth Wilson as Tanya.

A restless bunch of young radicals hang out, have sex, dance, drink, moan and philosophise at the home of a prosperous decorator. While Pyotr, a sometime student of law, falls for the lovely, loose-living lodger, his sister Tanya carps on about the tedium of life, lusts after Nil - who's blind to her charms but in pursuit of the servant - and botches her own suicide.

In Gorky's darkly comic first play of 1902, banned from public performance under the Czarist regime, a household falls to pieces as the personal and political turmoil of pre-revolutionary Russia gathers pace.