Summerfolk: an ‘incredible’ display of acting talent
In Robert Hastie’s “glorious revival” of Maxim Gorky’s tragi-comedy “Summerfolk”, the new regime at the National has its first “bona fide hit”, said Clive Davis in The Times.
Written in 1904, the play is a sprawling, plot-light affair with no fewer than 23 characters. In its approach and setting, it has echoes of Chekhov. But Gorky made his focus not the landed gentry on their estates, but the newly prosperous middle classes – “pre-revolutionary strivers” who are flirting and moping through a long summer in dachas that were built, perhaps, where the old cherry orchards had stood. And whereas the “good doctor” generated only “quizzical smiles”, Gorky delivers “earthy laughter” along with the pathos.
This production is “rich in period detail”, but the modern turns of phrase in Nina and Moses Raine’s adaptation “conjure up visions of 21st-century families bickering over what to watch on Netflix in a Tuscan Airbnb”.
The effect is “like Chekhov made explicit”, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. “All his references to sex, repression, the changing times, are here emphasised and elaborated as the characters fall in love, get bored, get angry, get drunk.” The play is “staggeringly wordy” (though this version is 40 minutes shorter than the last major staging in London in 1999), so the humour is welcome.
It takes a fine cast to make this work, and you won’t find a better one, said Dominic Maxwell in The Sunday Times. There is an “incredible” display of acting talent here. The sheer number of people wandering onto the stage does make the first half tricky: you wish they had name badges, the better to keep tabs on who is who; but the second half “finds the perfect fast-revolving pace of Chekhovian wit and wisdom, love and loss”.
Gorky’s critics complained that his characters lacked depth, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. These actors make us care, “in some cases sensationally so”. It is a “drawback” that the script is loaded with “distracting” modern vernacular and swearing. But go if you can. “Summerfolk” is so costly to stage, “it’ll be a generation before it’s back”.
Olivier, National Theatre, London SE1. Until 29 April