Throughout the National Theatre's generally excellent new production of Gorky's Summerfolk, my pleasure in the performance was repeatedly tugged in two directions. Both are important aspects of the National Theatre under Trevor Nunn's artistic direction.
On one hand, I was again and again distracted by the Olivier's new acoustic embellishments. Actors would turn away from the audience and yet we would hear them just as well. There were two particular points at which actors' voices would suddenly be swelled into a new dimension. I was frequently aware of a dim artificial echo around the voices.
On the other hand, I kept rejoicing in what this production of Summerfolk was releasing in the actors. For quite a number in the cast, this is now one of three productions in which they are playing. I love this repertory system anyway; and Nunn's NTEnsemble has had a higher rate of success than Peter Hall's Repertory Company in 1997 (at the Old Vic) and 1998 (at the Piccadilly Theatre). For example, Victoria Hamilton has been a vivid young actress who - despite seasons with both the RSC and the Peter Hall company - has tiresomely been held back by her tendency to act from the shoulder out (a narrow supply of unspontaneous arm gestures, recycled), from the knee down (the funny-walk school of acting), and with too tight and shallow a method of vocal production. Although she doesn't actually shed these habits in Summerfolk, she does, for the first time, subsume them - especially in the last two acts - in the larger sense of her character and in responding, beautifully, to the other characters.
As for Patricia Hodge, the roles she plays in Money and in Summerfolk - markedly dissimilar - have been a kind of breakthrough into a new level of authority and diversity that make her one of the ensemble's jewels. What Simon Russell Beale does here with a "small" role is a lesson to us all; his every line seems to enlarge the play and to take it on a new course.
All these and other artists seem to have grown because the NTEnsemble is truly that: an ensemble, of an order we seldom see. Everyone plays to each other with perfect address; we are seldom aware of actorly calculation or artifice; transparency is the general rule, so that we can usually forget that we are watching acting at all and can just lose ourselves in the play. A triumph for British acting today, this is one of the most valuable achievements of British theatre in 1999.
And of Summerfolk itself? Gorky completed it in 1904. How moving, as we reach the end of the century, to be returned to its start in this play, in which Gorky awesomely charts the seismic sociological shifts that would soon change the world. The texture of the first three acts is close to that of Chekhov, and the second act in particular is a marvel of changing dramatic tone, with the highs and lows of the human spirit juxtaposed to both tragic and comic effect. But what makes the play Gorkian is his disturbing demonstration of new social tensions: tensions not just between the classes but also between the sexes. The play is long (three hours 45 minutes), but does not feel it. At the end, society is actually coming apart. Admittedly, Nick Dear's new English version and Nunn's production over-emphasise this. Other societies, we feel, will soon come apart too.
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