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Howard Davies on directing Philistines.

Director Howard Davies discusses his long-held interest in the play with Rachel Halliburton of Time Out.

'You change over the years as a director, asserts Howard Davies. 'When I started out all I wanted to do was Edward Bond and Bertolt Brecht, because I wanted to carry the torch for socialism. I'm now much more interested in nuance and ambiguity and people's failings.'

Gorky's first play Philistines may be more nuanced and ambiguous than much of Bond or Brecht's work, but socialism is still its driving dynamic – when it was first performed in Tsarist Russia it was banned. Set in a sprawling family apartment presided over by a domineering house painter, it details the fissures that appear between two generations in the groundswell of pre-revolutionary Russia. 'I've wanted to do the play for a long time,' declares Davies. 'It was one of the first things I suggested to Nick [Hytner] when he was forming his directorate at the National.'

The drama was written in 1901, when Gorky was moving in the left-wing circles that would lead him to meet Lenin one year later. Davies believes that its depiction of a society where undercurrents of anger are about to sweep away the bourgeois status quo has plenty of relevance today. 'The young people know acutely that the values and bourgeois money-grubbing attitudes of their seniors have got to go. The older generation is sitting on them and not letting them find their voice, personally, or socially, or sexually. Their world is creaking at the seams and it will bust apart. I don't think that kind of play ages.'

Amid the vast rabble of characters, Davies finds himself drawn most to Pyotr, a law student expelled for subversive behaviour, and Teterev, one of the family lodgers. 'They're the two I recognise most in my life. Teterev, a very bleak prototype Marxist, is also very much based on Gorky's own life. He went round Russia dressed as a tramp in search of the truth. It was totally romantic in one way, but he wanted to identify himself with the people who were impoverished.'

Getting a strong sense of these two characters was vital as a starting point for Davies' staging of Philistines. 'For me it isn't working if I can't hear the voices. It's almost like listening for the different instruments in an orchestra. 'You know that the overall tune has to be played, but each instrument makes a specific contribution.'