In April, Hilary Fannin’s radical adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun will premiere on the Abbey Theatre stage. Augusta Gregory and Maxim Gorky wrote at a time of profound political change from different corners of Europe. Our mutual history is rooted in those events and their aftermath, in the troubled century that brings us to the present. 

At its core, Children of the Sun is the story of how a small family, their odd rattlebag of friends and one quixotic stranger distract, entertain and enrage each other at a point of crisis, while beyond their fragile walls, their world is being reshaped by inexorable forces.  

We are all of us living – trying to live – in the face of overwhelming, cataclysmic change. Can collective thinking and / or belief systems: art, god, science, protect us, fuel us, contain us?  Do we find a reflection of ourselves in these people?