Children of the Sun

I am attempting to colonise the last frontier. Time, Elena, time. If we could inhabit different iterations of self, we could undo all the mistakes of the past. Don’t you see?

Hilary Fannin’s radical adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s classic 1905 dark comedy reworks the original text and draws it into the here and now. Children of the Sun is the story of a small family and their quixotic collection of acquaintances, entertaining and enraging each other while, unseen beyond their fragile walls, their world is being reshaped by unstoppable forces.

The play asks how we survive without the benefit of hindsight and whether science, art or love are capable of saving us from uncertainty and destruction.

Co-produced by Rough Magic and the Abbey Theatre, Children of the Sun premiered on the Abbey stage as part of Rough Magic’s 40th-anniversary year in April 2024. This edition was published to coincide with that production.

Hilary Fannin (b. 1962) worked for many years as an actress both on stage and in television. A founder member of Wet Paint Arts theatre company, her first play, Mackerel Sky, was performed at the Bush Theatre (1997). She has written two radio plays: Red Feathers, and Dear Exile, both broadcast by BBC Radio 4. Sleeping Around, co-written with Stephen Greenhorn, Abi Morgan and Mark Ravenhill, was produced by Paines Plough, London in 1998, while Red Ball, which was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre’s Education and Outreach Department, was performed by the National Association of Youth Drama in 2004. Fannin was joint Writer-in-Association at the Abbey Theatre for the centenary year.

Maxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, 225 miles east of Moscow, in 1868. By 1878 both his parents were dead and he spent his youth as a nomadic labourer. In 1898 his collection of Stories and Sketches was published and proved an immediate success. His plays include The Lower Depths (1902), Summerfolk (1904), Children of the Sun (1905), Barbarians and Enemies (1906) and Yegor Bulichev (1932). His other books include Childhood and My Universities and the novel The Mother. A socialist from his early days, he never joined the Communist Party. He offered qualified support to the Soviet state after 1918, living abroad from 1924 to 1932. In 1934 he became head of the Writers’ Union but his work showed an increasing awareness that something had gone wrong with the revolution. He died in 1936.