by Maxim Gorky
seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 1 April 2026
Robert Hastie directs a large ensemble cast in Maxim Gorky's 1904 play Summerfolk in an adaptation by Nina Raine and Moses Raine who are siblings: interestingly a sibling relationship between Varvara (Sophie Rundle, wonderfully calm and inscrutable for much of the time) and Vlass (Alex Lawther, bumbling and unsure of himself and yet managing to be boyishly endearing) is one of the central interests of the play.
The "summer folk" - in Russian, the "dachniki" - are those town or city dwellers who rent or retire to dachas for the summer to escape the stifling weather in their usual residences. In this play the characters are not wealthy enough to own dachas - that is, they are not landed gentry. In fact they are nouveaux riches, and somewhat bewildered by their unaccustomed affluence. Yet, only one generation away from the grinding poverty of their forebears, they are afflicted by the ennui and sense of drift so familiar from Chekhov's plays. Perhaps the unstructured holiday life makes matters worse.
The result is a play full of talk - at times quite clichéd talk - with tensions simmering underneath as friends drop in to Varvara and Sergei Bassov's dacha trailing their own problems, and an idolised literary figure makes a visit, proving to be a disappointment in the flesh, not least because his younger dashing good looks have given way to baldness - hardly relevant to his literary reputation but nonetheless significant in Varvara's eyes. Naturally Vlass, the wastrel younger brother perpetually at a loose end, is attracted to Maria, one of the visitors, but she is too conscious of the age gap between them to allow matters to progress, too painfully aware that she might just become a mother-substitute. Varvara in the meantime fends off declarations of love and finally, after maintaining an apparently icy reserve for much of the time, she explodes with wrath against her overbearing husband and leads a group of women "away".
But where will they go? The play, though at many points handling the sprawling interplay of men and women chatting or sniping at one another with real skill, does have its weak points, and perhaps this dramatic exit is one of them, coming as it does after a series of declamations from various people about the impossibility of their position in the world. Agonising about one's feelings of uselessness can only go so far, and flouncing off stage at the end is all very well - but where can such people go except back to their houses in town?
Whereas in Chekhov antagonisms rarely become explicit, here a number of them risk becoming merely melodramatic, with little scope for just papering over the cracks to carry on. The famous injunction (adapted from Chekhov's own comments about narrative economy) that if a gun is revealed then it must later be used is somewhat mangled by the fact that one character does indeed flourish a gun during a marital argument, but a completely different character wounds himself (presumably with a completely different gun) later in the play.
A more serious issue is the tone of the adaptation. We are faced with the problem of our own knowledge of subsequent history. Both Chekhov's and Gorky's characters seem to be aware that their situations are untenable, but of course they have no knowledge of what happened in Russia a decade or two afterwards, or in Summerfolk's case, just the year after publication. In Summerfolk the presentiments are sharper, not least with the presence of a couple of local watchmen who speak contemptuously of the seasonal incomers. Their comments must have been disturbing when the play was written, but they now seem grimly ironic - yet the programme note unnecessarily hammers the point home by setting the play in 1905 (the year of Russia's Bloody Sunday and failed revolution) even though the play was written in 1904.
Furthermore the adapters have at times chosen language that could hardly have been spoken in polite society (even under stress) or among those aspiring to be of the intelligentsia or the upper bourgeoisie. Some of the outbursts are unnecessarily vulgar and even references to "sex" in more casual moments are more direct than a more decorous age would have deemed appropriate.
However, these are minor distractions. The production is finely mounted in a versatile set (designed by Peter McKintosh) which makes full use of the Olivier stage to represent a dacha and its environs, even revealing a swimming hole in the second half. The cast manage the swirling conversations and shifts of emotion with great skill, allowing us to follow the important shifts of focus even if we, as non-Russians, inevitably can get confused by the plethora of characters. It is utterly refreshing to know that modern actors can still participate successfully in a play with a large cast, when so much contemporary writing, constrained by financial restrictions, concentrates on a much smaller group of characters.
