When we look back on 1999, I suspect the creation of the new ensemble at the National Theatre will be recognised as its dramatic highlight.
Trevor Nunn's marvellous company has shone throughout the year. There have been exemplary, illuminating productions of Troilus and Cressida and The Merchant of Venice; a revival of the musical Candide which proved that Bernstein's unwieldly masterpiece could actually work on stage; and a night of pure pleasure with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Victorian comedy, Money.
The final production of the season is one of the great ensemble pieces, Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk (1904), and the company is in its element, offering performances of beguiling freshness and detail. Even at three-and-a-half hours, the show doesn't seem a minute too long.
At times, Summerfolk seems like a parody of Chekhov. A group of bourgeois Russians are spending the summer in their country dachas. There is much idleness and languor, a great deal of drinking; love affairs come to the boil, violent arguments break out and at the end the characters disperse.
Yet there are crucial differences betwen Chekhov and Gorky. Chekhov never seems to sit in judgement on his characters, whereas in Summerfolk you can divide most of them into goodies and baddies; and while Chekhov is always ambivalent about politics, Gorky puts them centre stage, leaving no doubt that he is firmly in favour of radical social change.
He is, in short, a less subtle, and a less poetic writer than Chekhov, though thanks to the excellence of Nunn's production there are long passages when the play is utterly spellbinding.
With the help of an evocative birchwood design by Christopher Oram, and a witty, colloquial translation by Nick Dear, Nunn conjures up a succession of visually ravishing scenes when you seem to be watching not actors but the flow of life itself. The third-act picnic is an especially triumphant evocation of summer lassitude, boozy stupor, and marital unhappiness deepening into outright desperation.
The characters are divided into those who are complacently content with their bourgeois good fortune, and couldn't give a toss about the poor; and those who feel that they have betrayed their impoverished parents' hopes and are determined to improve Russian society.
A lesser director than Nunn would hammer this division home. Instead, Nunn realises that Gorky does quite enough hammering himself, and concentrates instead on detailed portraiture and marvellously acute analysis of the fault lines in three different marriages.
It's one of those occasions when you want to praise almost the entire cast. Roger Allam is once again outstanding as the lawyer, Bassov, whose sensitive wife (Jennifer Ehle, rather overdoing the clenched misery) is appalled by his philistine complacency. It would be easy to present Bassov as a cad but Allam finds baffled humanity and humour in the character too.
Simon Russell Beale and Beverley Klein are superb as a decent, harassed doctor and his misanthropic martyr of a wife, Henry Goodman is glitteringly compelling as a writer who has turned cyncial with the loss of his talent. Victoria Hamilton somehow manages to be irritating, funny and touching all at once as a neurotic beauty seeking escape from a wretched marriage, and there are lovely performances too from Patricia Hodge as a no-nonsense doctor suddenly overcome by love, Derbhle Crotty as an appalling pseud of a poet and Michael Bryant as a sweet old codger trying to escape from solitude.
It's a night of rich rewards and I just hope Nunn can keep his crack ensemble together when the present season ends.
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