Back in 1904 Chekhov's Cherry Orchard ended with the thud of axes as the entrepreneur Lopakhin destroyed the trees of the title and, by inference, their aristocratic owners. Gorky's Summerfolk, which opened the same year, comes across not just as a quizzical sequel to his friend and mentor's play but as a devastating corrective to Lopakhin's belief that the villas replacing the orchard would "be gay with life and wealth and luxury". The new summer residents and their hangers-on have wealth, but they are a gloomy, rancorous, purposeless lot: "Pimples on your bum" to quote the summary Nick Dear's vivid if freeish translation gives to a local worker.
Summerfolk was controversial from the first. Some loathed its socialist slant; the fell Lunacharsky, a critic before he became Lenin's Minister of Culture, praised its toughness and "cruelty"; and the convulsions of 1905 forced its closure. So why revive it in 1999, when its politics seem as bankrupt as those of Chekhov's landowners? It is a question triumphantly answered by Trevor Nunn and Fiona Buffini's superbly acted production, which leaves you feeling that Gorky was an acute observer of character - and, whatever his agenda, one with an eye for quirks and quiddities still to be spotted today.
Where to start, given that Nunn's National Theatre ensemble has expanded to 26 actors for this, the last offering in its six-play season? The impression is of an abundance of restless, rootless souls, all seeking fulfilment among the birch trees and wicker chairs of Christopher Oram's set: Victoria Hamilton as a wife whose girlish twitters conceal deep hatred for Oliver Cotton, her boorish husband; Simon Russell Beale as a doctor harassed both by his responsibilities and by an envious, self-pitying wife, Beverley Klein; Roger Allam as a smug lawyer and Derbhle Crotty as his aesthetically inclined sister; Jasper Britton as a verbose nihilist, Michael Bryant as a blunt old millionaire from Siberia, Henry Goodman as a famous writer well aware of his growing irrelevance.
As all these performances prove, Gorky had Chekhov's ability to humanise people he is mocking; but his ultimate aim is to make social judgments on them. The goats are those who started poor, joined the new bourgeoisie, and have betrayed their class roots. The sheep have similar backgrounds but long to change Russia. Here is the play's main problem, for their denunciations of idleness, selfishness, social injustice and triviality all too blatantly have Gorky's blessing.
Yet he proves able to humanise the good as well as the bad. Patricia Hodge's preachy physician has a yearning for the love she never found in an ugly childhood and marriage. Raymond Coulthard's apprentice attorney hides his revolutionary passion behind facetiousnesss. Jennifer Ehle, whose misfortune is to possess a social conscience yet be married to insensitive Allam, is as near to a protagonist and moral centre as the play offers. She suggests vulnerability, pain and disappointment behind the dreamy exterior. Like everyone else in this stunning revival, she wins your belief.
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