The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, directed by Ariette Taylor. Designed by Adrienne Chisolm, lighting by Emma Valente. With Adam Pierchalski, Bessie Holland, Alex Menglet, Chloe Armstrong, Denis Moore, Genevieve Picot, Evan Jureidini, Greg Stone, Luke Elliot, Heather Bolton, Malcolm Robertson, Marco Chiappi, Paul English, Natalia Novikova, Stewart Morritt and Syd Brisbane. Ariette Taylor Productions @ fortyfive downstairs until November 29.

Although there are persistent rumours that he was murdered on Stalin's orders, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, the founder of social realism, was the literary poster boy of the Bolshevik Revolution. His early life was of exemplary harshness: born Aleksei Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868, he was orphaned at an early age and sent out to work. He ran away from home when he was 12, and became an itinerant worker, barely escaping starvation. His teenage experiences prompted the adoption of his pseudonym Gorky, which means "bitter".

Among many other temporary jobs, he worked as a dishwasher on a Volga steamer, where the cook taught him to read, fostering the passion for writing that ultimately shaped his life. As a rising young writer he met Anton Chekhov, who urged him to write a play. He subsequently wrote two for the Moscow Arts Theatre, the most famous of which is The Lower Depths. The characters in this play are supposedly inspired by real people Gorky met at the Bugrov Homeless Shelter in Nizhny Novgorod. The Lower Depths is an unsparing portrait of Russia's underclass, a wretched and doomed group of people who scrabble for a living by whatever means they can - thievery, prostitution, piece work - and whose savagery is most often turned against each other.


It's also an essay on the choice between facing harsh truths or embracing delusions that make life bearable. The play itself reaches no conclusions: in the brutal social order that sifts some human beings to an irredeemable bottom, political or social insight can bring with it a crushing weight of despair, to which fantasy might be preferable. A delusion, says Gorky, can be life-saving, bringing hope where none exists and prompting action where despair brings only self-destructive apathy and cynicism. Only the strong and free can face the truth.

In many ways this production is a logical evolution, both in practice and philosophy, from the late '90s work of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, which was founded by director Ariette Taylor and Daniel Keene. This is reinforced by the cast; seven of the 17 performed with the KTTP, and several are founding members. And, as with the KTTP, this production is graced with some astounding performances from some of our best actors.

The KTTP began its work in 1997 in the Brotherhood of St Laurence Warehouse in Fitzroy. The plays were performed as poor theatre, using the furniture that was available in the warehouse for their sets. The company's early and most successful work was about people who seldom reach our main stages, those forced, because of circumstance or birth, to the invisible edges of society. As with Gorky, the plays Keene wrote for the KTTP examined the dehumanising processes of poverty and social marginalisation.

Keene and Gorky's work is certainly fuelled by social anger, but neither observe a simple politics. Gorky's Marxism led him to believe that culture was a redemptive force in social revolution, and he protested strongly to Lenin, whom he knew personally, against the Bolshevik persecution of intellectuals. On its premiere, his unsentimental portrayal of poverty in The Lower Depths caused revulsion for what was seen as its dark pessimism. Neither Keene nor Gorky traffick in the politics of empathy, the easy pity that is as easily forgotten: rather, they insist on the difficult and mutual recognition of humanity in even the least sympathetic and most brutalised of their characters. Ultimately, both are interested in the erasure of the line between Them and Us, the pitied and the pitying.

The Lower Depths is presented in a robust collaborative translation from a text by Alex Menglet, which sounded very good to my ear. Rather like Chekhov's early play Platonov, it's an exercise in realism. Beyond a couple of events which occur with a kind of random melodrama, nothing much happens. There is little attention to the dramatic shaping of plot: rather, Gorky is concerned with the disorderliness, the inartistic lack of purpose, which informs life itself. The play consists of the various characters arguing, playing cards or drinking; merely passing the time in ways that were later aestheticised in Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

What plot there is revolves around the arrival at the boarding house of Luka (Alex Menglet), an apparent innocent who believes, unlike any of the other characters, that every human being matters. He is a kind of derelict Pollyanna, spreading light among the inmates by recognising what each of them needs to believe to bear his or her life (or death, as the case may be); but it becomes clear that his comforting stories are not the fruit of naivety, but rather of a clear-sighted compassion, even a certain stark realism.

Meanwhile, a squalid domestic drama emerges between the miserly and exploitative landlord Kostylyov (Denis Moore), his vicious wife Vassilissa (Heather Bolton) and her lover the thief Vasska (Stewart Morritt). Vasska is in love with Vassilisa's sister, Natasha (Chloe Armstrong), who will have nothing to do with him. His passion arouses Vassilisa's jealousy, and she constantly beats her sister, and meanwhile plots the murder of her husband.

These events flow through the daily life of the boarding house, which is peopled by a various cast of characters. The Actor (Greg Stone) is a hopeless alcoholic whose memory has been largely erased by his addiction, the Baron (Marco Chiappi) is a man who has known better times ("I used to drink coffee before I got out of bed!") A locksmith, Klestch (Malcom Robertson) works constantly on a lock that can't be fixed while his wife Anna (Genevieve Picot) dies pathetically of consumption close by. The capmaker Bubnov (Syd Brisbane) and other characters provide a chorus of brutal scepticism (when Anna dies, Bubnov comments that at least that means she will stop coughing).

With 17 characters and a sprawling structure, the challenges of mounting this play ought to be obvious. Ariette Taylor's production demonstrates her directorial weaknesses as well as her strengths. For all the quality of the cast, the acting is uneven, with the less experienced performers tending to fall into mystifying caricature. Even deeply capable actors such as Heather Bolton or Chloe Armstrong seem oddly subdued.

On the other hand, there are superlative performances from Syd Brisbane, Paul English, Stewart Morritt and Marco Chiappi. It is a particular pleasure to watch Alex Menglet accessing his full abilities, rather than merely providing comic relief in a cameo role. His portrayal of Luka is multifaceted, detailed and moving. Greg Stone is at the top of his considerable game as the Actor; he lights up the stage with a performance that is almost an essay on acting, creating a role that is itself a role, a man whose transparent facade constantly crumbles into pathetic self-realisation.

This is acting as good as you will see, and it often transcends the limitations of the production. When it does, the result can be electrifying. But for the first half, the direction is distracting, seldom achieving the moment-to-moment focus that Gorky's writing requires to maintain compelled attention. Adrienne Chisolm's design doesn't help: the pillars in the midst of fortyfive downstairs - which have been craftily avoided in other productions - stand in the main performing space, causing acute problems with sightlines: actors are constantly disappearing behind them in the midst of speeches. Moreover, some of the action occurs in a kitchen behind the stage, obscured from most of the audience.

The intrusion of such mundane irritations might have worked if there was a sense that they were more than ad hoc. But there was little feeling until after interval that the production was more than a series of brilliant individual performances strung together with some pretty choreography. The stage action was all too dislocated in the opening scenes, a problem emphasised by the uneven acting. Once the stage focused on a more conventional mise en scene around a table in the second half, the play livened up. Unlike Chekhov's Ivanov, which Taylor directed in a revelatory production three years ago, Gorky's play is too unwieldy for a show to rely solely on performance and text: it needs a stern intelligence creating theatrical shape around it.

For these and other reasons, the production doesn't wholly escape romanticising its subject. Its Russian protagonists are sufficiently distanced for their realism to remain historicised, even exoticised, rather than making them uncomfortably present in their human dilemmas. It's worth seeing for the acting, some of which is remarkable; but it ultimately seems a decadent and swollen shadow of the beauty and complex political power of the first KTTP productions in that Fitzroy warehouse.

Picture: Chloe Armstrong in The Lower Depths. Photo: Jeff Busby

Disclosures: I am married to Daniel Keene and was a member of the Board of the KTTP for the length of its existence.