Rating: ****
Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk, written in 1904, is a great company play: a scathing portrait of the new Russian professional class at leisure. As such it is a perfect vehicle for the National Theatre's ensemble; but watching this richly detailed production, directed by Trevor Nunn with Fiona Buffini, one also feels a pang of regret that this is its last scheduled outing.
Gorky's play clearly owes a considerable debt to Chekhov: it is about the new middle-class practice, vividly described by Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, of renting a summer villa in the country. Here we are in the provincial retreat of Bassov, an unscrupulous lawyer, who is surrounded by doctors, engineers, government officials and their sundry discontented partners. They drink like fishes, fish like drinkers, fornicate, gossip and generally behave with the reckless hedonism of the newly prosperous. Emotionally the focal figure is Varvara, Bassov's genteel wife, who is not only repelled by the emptiness of their lives but is shattered when a literary idol of her teens, Shalimov, turns out to be as coarse-grained as the rest of them.
The Chekhovian echoes are everywhere: the visiting writer, the amateur theatricals, the feverish declarations of unhappiness. But the big difference is that Gorky, while lacking his colleague's symphonic mastery, was far more committed to social action. If Varvara is the play's emotional centre, her friend Maria Lvovna, an idealistic doctor, is Gorky's political mouthpiece. It is typical of his eccentric dramaturgy that she is condemned as a windbag before we have really heard her speak. But her great alfresco tirade in the last act clearly expresses Gorky's view: that Russia has never before had an educated bourgeoisie with direct ties to the working class and that they should work not only to improve the lives of the masses but "to annihilate this sense of solitude we feel".
Gorky's teeming, three-and-three-quarter-hour play is both socially specific and eternally relevant. But, if I have any cavil with Nick Dear's new version, it is that it strains too hard to bring out the play's modernity. To its credit, it highlights Gorky's embryonic feminism and faith in women as moral touchstones: Varvara's final decision to leave is sparked by overhearing a torrent of chauvinist filth. But the four-letter words, the odd phrase like "dreadful whinger" and even the imported jokes ("How many people work at the medical centre?" "About half of them") lift the play bodily out of its historical context.
The irony is that the production's great strength is precisely its sense of place and time: everything from the spindly birch trees of Christopher Oram's set to the offstage bird cries and watchman's whistles. The investment in ensemble also pays off handsomely in the acting. Raymond Coulthard has grown in stature with each production and lends Varvara's shiftless, identity-seeking brother exactly the right dangerously neurotic jokiness.
Even the fact that Jennifer Ehle as Varvara is a newcomer to the company works to her advantage, since it highlights her tragic isolation. And there is sterling work from Roger Allam as her oafish husband, Patricia Hodge as the impassioned Maria Lvovna and Henry Goodman as the visiting writer wreathed in egostistical self-regard and Derbhle Crotty as an airy poetess he cruelly patronises. This production triumphantly demonstrates the benefits of ensemble acting that the National would be foolish to squander.
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