Enemies

Enemies
By Maxim Gorky
Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair and Jeremy Brooks
Director: Timothy Trimingham Lee

Performed by Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, MA Acting Classical students

Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov are naturally seen as dramatic cousins. But while Chekhov’s avuncular humanism captures life in all its fleeting absurdity, Gorky’s moral rancour lashes out across the stage. Not content to signal the rumblings of seismic change, Gorky theatricalises the beginnings of revolution in his incendiary 1906 play Enemies. When workers at a local factory demand the sacking of a manager, a chain of events leads to murder, and the rich are confronted with the strident defiance of the poor. This explosive portrait of Russia on the doorstep of the Bolshevik Revolution remains strikingly current and immediate.