A small provincial Russian town is suddenly aroused from its lethargy by the imminent arrival of the first railroad. Gorky is less concerned here with the Industrial Revolution than with the damaging personal effect of people who represent progress; in this case, two engineers who come to prepare for the railroad and who sweep into the lives of all and sundry with the force of a gale, upsetting stalemated romances, stale marriages, and the equilibrium of the petty bureaucracy.

Sung at a funeral and a wedding today. The full gamut of the human experience from the ridiculous to the utterly pointless. A restless bunch of young radicals hang out, have sex, dance, drink, moan and philosophise at the home of a prosperous decorator. While Pyotr, a sometime student of law, falls for the lovely, loose-living lodger, his sister carps on about the tedium of life, lusts after Nil - who's blind to her charms but in pursuit of the servant - and botches her own suicide. Life. People shout, fight, eat and go to bed. When they wake up? They start shouting again. In this house everything fades quickly. Tears, laughter. Everything. Dissipates. The last sounds ringing out over the lake. Then nothing. A banal hum. A household falls to pieces as the personal and political turmoil of pre-revolutionary Russia gathers pace. Gorky's darkly comic first play of 1902, banned from public performance under the Czarist regime, is seen here in an exuberant new version by Andrew Upton. Philistines premiered at the National Theatre, London, in May 2007.