History Made Human

Patricia Hodge, as Maria, and Jennifer Ehle, as Varvara, are caught in the storm (Photograph: Mark Ellidge)

With the opening of Gorky's Summerfolk (Olivier), the National Theatre's repertory season, Ensemble 99, is now complete: a company of 60 actors is playing in six different plays in two theatres. In the fatness of these pursy times, this is a terrific achievement. The National is, once again, on the crest of the wave.

The logistics and finances of running a repertory company are a complex and shadowy area. What is beyond doubt is its artistic value. Stylistically and historically, this season ranges widely. It includes two Shakespeares, one popular (The Merchant of Venice), one seldom played (Troilus and Cressida); a serious modern musical based on Voltaire (Candide); a contemporary American play which provided the season's only flop (The Dark Side of the Earth); a Victorian social comedy-drama (Money); and now a modern Russian classic, from 1904. They are linked by overlapping themes: the nature of moral commitment, the clash between public action and private motivation, between personal values and social repressions, and depending on the world and caring for it. It is a moral battlefield. How do you safeguard your integrity, your values and the good within, in communities where achievements have price tags determined by dogma, politics or money?

These themes are all too apt for the bustling, cocky 1990s: they should activate your ethical instincts, and indeed make you think about whether the ethical can be instinctive. The choice of Gorky's Summerfolk is a double challenge, and Trevor Nunn's production rises to it with a cunning and subtle mixture of tact, imagination and brute force. Why, you may wonder, do Gorky at all? Even more important: should you use a politically and artistically dubious play about moral and civic values in an argument about such values?

Gorky was not a good playwright. He never wrote anything better than his volumes of autobiography, partly because he was a storyteller rather than an animator, partly because he was more interested in what he had to say about the world than what the world had to say to him, and partly because he was a writer with a political mission which affected him as a personal grievance. So was Strindberg - except that Strindberg, in his best work, showed an even-handed understanding of all his characters which Gorky could never quite equal. He was short on that impersonal and profoundly moral sense of compassion that went into the creation of an Iago, Strindberg's Laura or Chekhov's Arkadina.

Summerfolk is packed with characters who badly need their creator's compassion. The atmosphere is tetchy, restless, despondent. This is an overpopulated but deserted world. A group of mostly professional people are spending the summer in the Russian countryside agonising about their lives and also about whether they should be agonising about it. Bassov (Roger Allam) is a hard-drinking lawyer whose only problem is that he is an ordinary, rather coarse man married to a more intelligent and refined woman. This, at any rate, is the assumption. In fact, Gorky's way of suggesting this is to make Varvara (Jennifer Ehle) take offence at vulgar remarks and brood about the emptiness and futility of her life. When she was young, Varvara heard a speech by an enlightened young writer, Shamilov (Henry Goodman); now he appears as a middle-aged, cynical compromiser with a sharp eye for the local talent, and Varvara is shattered. Bassov's drinking companion, the engineer Suslov (Oliver Cotton), feels persecuted by Maria Lvovna, an argumentative, radical, slightly obnoxious doctor (Patricia Hodge). Another doctor (Simon Russell Beale) struggles with a sense of futility and the problems of being married to a garrulous, ordinary wife (Beverley Klein).

Varvara's young brother, Vlass (Raymond Coulthard), who works for Bassov, falls in love with Maria Lvovna, who, at 38, feels like an old woman. Her 18-year-old daughter Sonia (Gabrielle Jourdan) is in love with Maxim, a surly student with whom she discusses class solidarity. In the garden somebody is putting on a play. Periodically, grim representatives of the common people appear, grumbling about these summer folk who leave behind nothing but litter.

Gorky's main problem was that he was not Chekhov. The wings of a Seagull spread out helplessly over this angry, well-meaning, over-written play. Gorky was longing to write the plain-but-subtle dialogue, apparently inconclusive but full of undercurrents, of which Chekhov was such a master, but the doctrinaire apostle in him kept coarsening it into diatribe. He was interested in what Russians were doing to their homeland, its environment and resources, but you have only to compare his concerns with Chekhov's in Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard to see that they function only as slogans. He touches on a social-political notion, namely that his characters, members of the educated bourgeoisie, were the first of this group in Russia to come directly from the underclass, but he makes nothing of it. The self-awareness of his characters mostly means saying what Gorky thinks of them. The play reads like a first draft by a hugely talented young autodidact. He could never have done what Chekhov did: re-imagine and rewrite a diffuse play such as The Wood Demon and turn it into Uncle Vanya. When Chekhov said that Gorky was a barbarian, he meant that he had no artistic self-control.

What Nunn has done with this lumbering, self-conscious play is nothing short of miraculous. He and his actors bring an emotional music to the dialogue, a psychological generosity, which subtly and kindly subverts Gorky's coarseness and puts you in touch with his inspiration. The characters sound, not like spokesmen of doctrines, or like those Typical Representatives of Their Class so beloved of socialist realist commissars, but like people who are caught up unawares in a historical moment. Gorky's political drive is not weakened; it is, if anything, reinforced by the characters' sense of restlessness and impotence.

All this is done by simple but cunning means. The dialogue ripples and overlaps, giving it a sense of spontaneity. What the characters say about themselves is made to sound less like Gorky's often primitive psychological designer labels and more like the self-betrayals of people who are not accustomed to thinking. Nick Dear's new version is a help here. Himself a playwright, Dear is determined to do for his great, craggy forebear what he could not do for himself: the text is discreetly pruned and made more pointed and idiomatic, and it receives a few shots of vividly theatrical humour that Gorky was too insecure to use.

Is this right, though? Yes and no. In a purist sense, it is wrong to pretend that a play is better than the author who wrote it. On the other hand, Gorky had a huge impact, at a sensitive and historic period, on an audience that was not used to explicit political argument. His plays were both a symptom of their time and a shaping force of the times to come. Summerfolk is precisely the kind of play the National Theatre should revive: it illustrates history and humanises it.

I hope that Nunn is already planning Ensemble 2000. Ensemble acting by a permanent company is the very lifeblood of the theatre. All its great advances, since the days of Edward Alleyn and Shakespeare, were made by permanent companies. Repertory acting is also the true testing ground of individual talent: look how, moving from role to role, Ensemble 99 has confirmed and increased the reputations of Henry Goodman, David Bamber, Roger Allam, Simon Russell Beale and Jasper Britton, and turned the spotlight on younger actors such as Victoria Hamilton, Gabrielle Jourdan, Alex Kelly and Daniel Evans. Repertory seasons, inspired by a theme and planned with care and intelligence, are a gateway to understanding history, theatre and the other arts in each other's reflection. Education, education, education, as the fellow said. Also, you have a terrific time.

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