We should try to be different. We really should! We're the children of cooks and laundry-women and decent working people. We have a duty to be different! Never before has our great country had an educated bourgeoisie with direct blood ties to the working class. Those ties should feed us, should plant in us a burning desire to improve and regenerate and illuminate the lives of our own people - people who toil and toil, till the day they die trapped in dirt and darkness. --Maria Lvovna

• The dysfunctional couple at the play's centre -- Roger Allam as Sergei Bassov, the aimless lawyer who fritters away his time and Juliet Aubrey as his sincere wife, Varya Bassova
• Patricia Hodge, as a socialist middle aged woman doctor who sees a new political future, yet is too conventional to stomach a love affair with Vlass (Raymond Coulthard), a man young enough to be her son.
• Philip Whitchurch as the disillusioned Shalimov who has been the subject of Varya's fantasy, and who must voice some of Gorky's misgivings about what writers can achieve.
• There are also amusing cameos from Simon Russell Beale as the overworked, bumbling doctor and Beverley Klein his comic and stressed wife, Olga. Derbhle Crotty, in a very different role from her usual heroines is here an embittered woman. She provides plenty of laughter when she recites her own terrible poetry to indifferent music and with poses a la Isadora Duncan.