If you really wanted to feel the heat of a national hothouse, the Russia of the 1905 Revolution was the place where the flames of violence were being fanned by bigotry, ignorance and justified grievances against poverty and oppression. Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun was written while he was in prison for his part in the upheavals and is the latest in the adaptations of Russian repertoire at the National by Andrew Upton and director Howard Davies. 

The move from a diet of Chekhov and Bulgakov to Gorky, a more angular and contradictory writer, speaks well for the duo's ambition. Chekhov offers audiences a lament for a disappearing world; Gorky illustrates the changing Russia as a place of score-settling, where revenge and ignorance combine to destroy the intelligentsia.

So the Protasov household drifts towards disaster with an ineffectual master (Geoffrey Streatfeild) locking himself away with his chemistry experiments, oblivious to social and marital discord. The production reunites veterans of an earlier Upton/Davies triumph, The White Guard, with Bunny Christie as the designer of a Russian villa-cum-fortress, Paul Higgins as the lovelorn vet and Justine Mitchell as his mentally unstable paramour Lena.

True, Upton's fondness for visiting Aussie — loads of swearing and slang onto Russian classics means that this is not quite the play wot Gorky wrote (there are jarring moments, like a character looking back on time at "Uni") but it's not such a distortion that you can't see through to the intention of the work. It ends with a conflagration, hot enough to warm the front rows of the stalls. 

Speaking of a spoilt intelligentsia who ought to know better, Stephen Sondheim's musical theatre equivalent of Pinter's Betrayal, Merrily We Roll Along, which had a famously disastrous first outing on Broadway in 1981, has been revived at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Despite many revisions and director Maria Friedman's professional attentions, you can still see why it flopped on debut. A drama in which we meet the characters in full mid-life crisis and then wind backwards gives away its secrets in the first ten minutes.