Heat. Wine. Sexual tension. A vague pervading sense of dread. Longing – not for someone but for something, that may or may not exist. Denial, perfected into an art form as exquisite as the competitive poetics and philosophising with which the cast of frustrated Russian intelligentsia absorb themselves. “Fuzzy warm melancholy,” as one of them puts it in a flash of self-deprecating insight. The inability – the refusal – to face life.
These are the themes that concern the “summerfolk” (according to the servants “even when they’re different, they’re the same”) of Maxim Gorky’s sweeping social tragedy of manners, who have retreated from their townhouses and real lives to a rural fantasy of fishing and flirtation. The year is 1904 and Chekhov is dead. (“Did you see the Cherry Orchard?” “Went on too long, didn’t like it.”) Where a cherry orchard may once have stood is now a park of idyllic holiday dachas. Politics has been banished. Yet all the jollity that can be mustered from champagne and Shakespeare recitals cannot dispel the middle-class anxiety, the fear that this group of socially mobile lawyers and doctors and engineers, who remember all too clearly what it was to be poor, are about to get eaten. That they are, in fact, “lunch”.
Almost a century and a quarter on from Summerfolk’s debut, the National Theatre’s revival, adapted by sibling 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 melted) in aspic on the cusp of seismic upheaval, sensing the tremors in the rustle of muslin skirts and ripples on the lake, self-awareness begins to dawn. Our chronically searching heroine Varvara (Sophie Rundle) confronts the cracks in her marriage to bombastic upstart (Paul Ready), who morphs from entertainingly brash to oafishly sinister as the suffocating heat rises and the port flows. Her younger brother Vlass (Alex Lawther) has the air of a deity’s doomed love interest in a Greek myth, yearning for meaning in a world that doesn’t seem quite real. Will he find it in the impassioned and captivatingly idealistic social reformer Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell), 20 years his senior, who alone among this group of new bourgeoisie keeps one eye on those at the bottom they left behind? And does any of it really matter anyway?
Over three dream-like hours, a reckoning drifts ever just out of reach. The audience doesn’t care, lost in Peter McKintosh’s majestic set, the struts of the dacha becoming a dappled forest of infinite trees, the Olivier stage of the National Theatre transformed into a stream for the characters to swim, dip their feet, and hop across with tense, balletic grace. (Will they trip? Will the drama reach its climax? No, not yet.) The ensemble cast, 23 strong, maintain a tangle of plotlines – love declared and spurned, grievances aired and dismissed, friendships strained, grand theories expounded and ambitions frustrated – as intricate as the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream they attempt to stage. They grasp at meaning, and at times almost catch it. It will not – cannot – save them.
“The life of any thinking person is a tragedy,” one discontented poet despairs towards the end, coming as close as she dares to the epiphany she craves. Summerfolk will make you think – about class and change and insecurity, about the lies we tell ourselves and the scars those lies leave – just as much today as it did in 1904. A sublime tragedy, then, not just for Gorky’s characters – but for the audience.
[Further reading: Timothée Chalamet is right: ballet is ready to die]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment