Review: SUMMERFOLK starring Sophie Rundle, National Theatre

If The Cherry Orchard is the diagnosis (something Anton Chekhov, a doctor, was well placed to dispense), his protégé, Maxim Gorky, arrived hard on his heels with the shock treatment of Summerfolk. And shocking it was in the roiling, revolutionary Russia of 1905. As Gerald Ratner (Remember him? No? Well there you are) found out, it’s best not to eviscerate your customers on stage. But change was coming and Gorky, took the boos from those rattling their jewellery in stalls and the cheers from those in the cheap seats and lived on to sup with Stalin.

That’s a way off when we open on a dacha, a middle class holiday home amongst the Russian birch trees (beautifully realised by Peter McKintosh), the kind of getaway for which the cherry orchard gave its life. Wealth is obvious in the laundered white linen suits and long dresses, in the silent servants, eyes darting, and in the languorous manner in which time is marked. Ennui is the prevailing mood, nothing need be done, so nothing is done, as the security guards prowl the estate’s boundary, whistling regularly. Are they keeping the peasants out or the lawyers, doctors and property developers in? 

Vavara Bassova is the mistress of the house, Sophie Rundle luminous, ethereal, but Vavara’s boredom at the sheer futility of each day lining up to be the same as the last one, merely punctuated by variations in the sources of irritation, is eating her from the inside out. Her husband, Sergei (Paul Ready turning up the smartarsery to 11) is a gossipy lawyer with a putdown for everyone and everything, and her brother, Vlass (Alex Lawther) has wandered in from The Seagull, a failed poet, who does not dress for dinner - indeed, barely dresses at all like its Lockdown 2020 all over again.

In a genuinely ensemble work, a variety of Chekhovian types drift in and out of the dacha: cue the blocked writer, Shalimov (Daniel Lapaine) whose ordinary provincialism disappoints the once besotted Vavara; the squeaking shit-stirrer, Olga (Gwyneth Keyworth) and the lovelorn Ryumin (Pip Carter) who, like Vanya, botches his half-hearted suicide attempt.     

It’s hard to like any of this menagerie of misanthropes, but it’s easy to be amused by them, Nina and Moses Raine’s adaptation sparkling with the language clever people use to talk to other clever people and (as was the case for Nick Dear’s 1999 script on this stage) unafraid to use contemporary expressions. That’s a useful jolt to start up the post-show pondering on the Tube home.

The character other than Vavara who can elicit any sympathy (and Vavara might only get that privilege because we’re more aware now of the Black Dog barking than we were even 27 years ago) is Maria Lvovna. 

Justine Mitchell (like most of the cast, using her own accent, in this case Irish) lends a self-deprecating intelligence to the 50-something doctor, the unlikely, at least to herself, paramour of the 20-something Vlass. She gives in to the temptation to salve the long open wound of loneliness and frustration, but she also knows that the her future will look very different to the present, a brutal truth she confides to her daughter (Tamika Bennett, super in a small role). That manifest wisdom gives her vicious denunciation of an entire class of intelligentsia at a nightmarish end of summer dinner party all the more force, director Robert Hastie’s slow build to that climax fully vindicated.

Occupying the National Theatre’s largest house for a couple of months comes with some responsibility - a near three hour exercise in rural repartee can’t be enough. But, as I opened my WhatsApp on the phone on the way home (there’s no escape, even underground), I realised that the little green square with sanded off corners was today’s dacha.

There we were, like Vavara’s soi disant friends, ex-working class made good (well, goodish) by education and luck, grateful for the health and wealth it has brought but slightly perplexed as to why it doesn’t feel better, why there isn’t our parents’ willingness to embrace Macmillan’s insistence that we “have never had it so good”. Any politician saying that now would be laughed out of court, but, objectively, for most people, it’s true.

But, as the play shows us in its closing scene and as 1905 Russia demonstrated, there are revolutionaries at the gates who are not sitting on their hands, swapping YouTube clips of Stephen Colbert being cutting, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being magnificent and Pete Hegseth being the opposite. They are intending to run, if not us, then our ideas out of town on a rail. This is an inconvenient truth.

So, after an evening of Gorky, a man whom I admire since, like Gustav Courbet and Antonio Gramsci (two more heroes) he served time for his principles, what did I do when I got home?

Doomscrolled Bluesky of course…   

Summerfolk at the National Theatre until 29 April