The heat. Summer. Sexual tension. A vague pervasive sense of dread. Merchandise – not for someone, but for someSOMETHINGwhich may or may not exist. Denial, perfected in an art form as exquisite as the competing poetics and philosophies with which the cast of frustrated Russian intelligentsia absorb themselves. “Warm fuzzy melancholy,” as one of them puts it in a sharp light of self-deprecation. The inability – the refusal – to face life.
These are the themes that concern the “summer” (according to the servants “even when they are different, they are the same”) of the comprehensive social tragedy of the manners of Maxim Gorky, who are drawn from their city homes and real life into a rural fantasy of fishing and flirting. It is 1904 and Chekhov is dead. (“Have you seen it The Cherry Orchard?” “I went on too much, I didn’t like it.”) Where there may once have been a cherry orchard is now a park with idyllic holiday cottages. Politics has been banished. Yet all the joy that can be gleaned from champagne and Shakespeare recitals cannot dispel middle-class anxiety, the fear that this group of socially mobile lawyers, doctors and engineers, who remember all too clearly what it meant to be poor, are about to be eaten. That they are, in fact, “lunch”.
Almost a century and a quarter later Summerfolk’s debut, the National Theater revival, adapted by co-writers Nina and Moses Raine and directed by Robert Hastie, feels as relevant as ever. The language has been updated, but the setting has not, giving this production a timeless quality. Frozen (or perhaps that should be thawed) on top of the seismic upheaval, feeling the vibrations in the rustle of muslin skirts and the ripples in the lake, consciousness begins to arise. Our chronically searching heroine Varvara (Sophie Rundle) faces the cracks in her marriage to the bombastic young man (Paul Ready), who turns from amusingly dashing to sinister as the sweltering heat rises and the port leaks. Her younger brother Vlass (Alex Lawther) has the loving air of a doomed deity in a Greek myth, yearning for meaning in a world that doesn’t seem real at all. Will he find it in the passionate social reformer and glamorous idealist, Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell), 20 years his senior, who is the only one among this group of new bourgeoisie to keep an eye on those ultimately left behind? And does any of it really matter anyway?
Over three dreamlike hours, a calculation keeps getting out of hand. The audience doesn’t care, lost in Peter McKintosh’s magnificent stage, the frames of the dacha becoming a wet forest of endless trees, the Olivier stage of the National Theater transformed into a stream for the characters to swim, dip their feet and dance with tense balletic grace. (Will they stumble? Will the drama reach its climax? No, not yet.) The ensemble cast, 23 strong, carries a jumble of lines — love declared and rejected, grievances aired and dismissed, friendships strained, grand theories expounded and ambitions frustrated — as intricate as the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream they try to stage. They understand the meaning and sometimes almost grasp it. It will not save them – it cannot save them.
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“The life of every thinking man is a tragedy,” a disaffected poetess despairs toward the end, getting as close as she dares to the epiphany she desires. Summer people it will make you think – about class, change and uncertainty, about the lies we tell ourselves and the scars those lies leave – as much as it did today in 1904. A sublime tragedy, then, not just for Gorky’s characters – but for the audience.
(Further reading: Timothée Chalamet is right: ballet is about to die)
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