Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Pawel Protassov is a reclusive chemist trying to save the world with experiments that mainly produce lots of smoke. Being the devoted chemist he his, he spends very little time with his wife Jelena, who, as a result starts an affair. Protassov also has an admirer: Melanja, the sister of his best friend Boris. But this love isn’t given a chance, as Protassov sees love as a merely chemical reaction and not as a physical thing. His friend Boris in turn fancies Protassov’s sister Lisa, but she is sickly and wheelchair-bound.

Russian playwright Maxim Gorki (Summerfolk) wrote Children of the Sun in 1905, the year of the first Russian revolution, an uprising which was violently suppressed by the Tsarist regime. But the characters in Children of the Sun are blissfully unaware of the unrest. They are preoccupied with their own lives, their status, their ambition and their love lives. While the revolution is roaring outside, the company keeps up appearances inside, while they discuss the superiority of reason and science over beauty and art.

Director Ivo Van Hove interprets ‘Children of the Sun’ as a reflection on the position of the intellectual elite in today’s society. The questions about identity and happiness as a mental state or a state of consciousness raised by ‘Children of the Sun’ are still relevant a hundred years after it was written.