Upwardly mobile, heading down

It wanders in pursuit of unhappy couples and aspiring romancers on communal summer holidays in their rented dachas. It will not satisfy those craving the easy fix of single-track theatrical narrative. But in Trevor Nunn's seductively atmospheric production Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk emerges as a transfixing piece of theatre, uniting comedy, satire and political diatribe in a post-Chekhovian swoop of politically motivated energy.

Premiered months after The Cherry Orchard in 1904, Summerfolk describes the grim conclusion to those entrepreneurial hopes for the upwardly mobile voiced in Chekhov's great play. Gorky's characters, their pretensions and malice observed with comic relish, are nouveau-richish, first-generation professionals whom education has rescued them from blue-collar skimping. In angry disappointment, Gorky presents these prosperous Russians as selfish, freelance materialists, devouring the fruits of prosperity, without thought of the poor. These Summerfolk brood about life's purpose but shrink from facing up to truth's cold douche.

Selfish materialists: Jennifer Ehle and Jasper Britton brood about life's purpose (photograph by Nigel Norrington)

Christopher Oram's alluring semi-circular stage with backdrop of birch trees and dried grass breathes an escapist air. Varya, married with scant happiness to Roger Allam's smug vulgarian lawyer, and Patricia Hodge in terrific form as a stringent, lovelorn doctor, convey the play's mood of personal and political disillusion. When Varya's teenage hero, the famous writer Shamilov, arrives on a visit, she discovers he is no more than a vacuous poser. Her contempt for the morally bankrupt Summerfolk springs from this realisation.

Maria, however, selflessly abandons a love affair with Raymond Coulthard's Vlass, a man young enough to be her son but keen to be her husband. She keeps issuing moral-health warnings for the holidaymakers to fight for social justice. These vignettes of personal despair and political activity give way to Summerfolk at play. Nunn organises huge set-piece actions with deft vigour, except at the close where he sentimentally imposes a happy ending upon Gorky's finale of ruined relations.

Delectable Michael Bryant, voice as dry and whining as sandpaper, plays a self-made millionaire and outsider observing the cut and thrusters. Jennifer Ehle's vibrato Varya starts at the end of her tether and has nowhere to go, and Victoria Hamilton's bored wife to Oliver Cotton's corrupt, selfish engineer is pertly skittish but insufficiently vicious. But Goodman's splendidly preening author, Oliver Cotton's corrupt engineer, Beverley Klein's malicious wife to Simon Russell Beale's touchingly woebegone husband and Derbhle Crotty as a victim to romantic wooziness place the dalliances in illuminating highlight.

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