Summerfolk Review: A Glacial Masterwork

Champagne is poured, cigarettes are lit, and yet another well-dressed malcontent declares that life is unbearable while making absolutely zero effort to change it. In Summerfolk, a sprawling ensemble of Russian lawyers, doctors, artists and professional idlers gather in a sunlit dacha to flirt, feud and philosophise their way through a collective existential crisis. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

At the centre are brittle marriages, unrequited desires and a simmering disgust with a society they both benefit from and despise. Everyone wants something, no one does anything, and the tension lies in whether self-awareness might finally tip into action. Spoiler: it mostly doesn’t.

There is something deeply reassuring about a play in which absolutely nothing happens for three hours except drinking, yearning and the slow, inexorable realisation that everyone is wasting their lives. Summerfolk arrives at the National Theatre like an elegantly dressed guest who has mistaken torpor for profundity and refuses to leave.

Maxim Gorky wrote Summerfolk in 1904, in the long shadow of a collapsing Russia and in the same year that Anton Chekhov died. The comparison is unavoidable: here are people who might have wandered out of a Chekhov play but stayed too long at the picnic, draining the samovar and the remaining will to live of all present. They may call themselves the intelligentsia and lounge, flirt, declaim and occasionally gesture towards meaning but most have next-to-nothing in the way of self-awareness. Meanwhile, history gathers ominously offstage waiting to make its entrance.

…the tension lies in whether self-awareness might finally tip into action. Spoiler: it mostly doesn’t.

The Raine siblings, Nina Raine and Moses Raine, approach the text with a surgeon’s precision, a poet’s ear and, at times, a sailor’s tongue. Their adaptation trims where necessary but wisely preserves the languor; the NT’s previous version in 1999 was around an hour longer. Their intimate approach bears fruit slowly, but surely, as impossibly self-centred characters you would barely notice if they were on fire become more fascinating as the minutes tick by.

Writing maketh the masterwork

It is the writing that marks this out as a masterwork. Lines land with that distinctly Russian blend of wit and despair, the sort that sounds like it should be embroidered on a cushion. Phrases spill out that, should they have been uttered in a streaming show and not on a stage, would become instant memes: “stupid gherkin of a man”, “I’m beautiful, that’s my trouble”, and “Good to be on your own when you’re young. Ah, the wanking years”. Peter Forbes’ aged businessman wanders around with his own catchphrase “You’re alright, you are” as a prelude to a business proposal or an unsubtle seduction while the doctor is described as someone who “delivers babies then stirs the tea with his finger”.

It is difficult to tell whether the Raines are parodying vapid influencers, valueless politicians or no one at all. Doon Mackichan’s poet is a wondrous fountain of protestation, wandering the grounds shouting out “none of us is happy!”, admitting to feeling “a grey anger” or declaiming someone else’s “frigid ideas about more for the many but not the few. Where’s the beauty in that?” When one man is advised that he should go off and apologise to his angry wife as “it’s just paperwork”, you feel that this is a line that could have come straight from a Cabinet Office conversation of any era.

**Sid Sagar and Gwyneth Keyworth. Photo by Johan Persson**

The use of modern language may appear at odds with the period costuming and set design, but it serves its purpose by bridging this play from Gorky’s time to ours. Besides, when was the last time any of Shakespeare’s Italian-set plays sounded remotely authentic? It’s a contrast that perhaps serves its audience better than the purists.

Rhythm, breath and thrills

Director Robert Hastie deserves considerable praise for marshalling this vast, drifting ensemble into something approaching coherence. This is a production that understands rhythm, even when that rhythm is deliberately glacial. Hastie allows scenes to breathe, then gently suffocates them under the weight of their own repetition. It is, perversely, thrilling.

And then there is the set. Peter McKintosh conjures a dacha idyll so lush you can practically smell the privilege. It is all sun-dappled wood and expansive space, a playground for the idle rich that becomes, by degrees, a gilded cage. The design does a great deal of narrative heavy lifting, suggesting the encroaching storm that the characters themselves steadfastly refuse to acknowledge.

It is the writing that marks this out as a masterwork. Lines land with that distinctly Russian blend of wit and despair, the sort that sounds like it should be embroidered on a cushion. Phrases spill out that, should they have been uttered in a streaming show and not on a stage, would become instant memes…

The ensemble, sprawling and uniformly excellent, lean into the absurdity of their own inertia. These are people who declare love as if auditioning for it, who argue philosophy as though it were a competitive sport, and who experience epiphanies with all the urgency of a delayed train. One suspects that if revolution arrived in the middle of Act Two, they would ask it to come back later, preferably after supper.

Hynotic, compelling emptiness

Context matters. Russia in 1905 was a society on the brink, its inequalities sharpening into something combustible. Gorky saw it clearly. His summerfolk do not. They sip, they sigh, they soliloquise, all while the world tilts. The play’s great joke, and its quiet tragedy, is that these characters are not the heroes, villains or successes they paint themselves to be, merely irrelevant footnotes in a forest. If Chekhov wrote about people who couldn’t change, Gorky writes about people who wouldn’t. The difference is subtle but devastating.

Despite that, for all its longueurs and luxuriant stasis, there is something hypnotic here. The language sparkles. The direction is assured. The design is sumptuous. You may occasionally wish for someone to do something, anything, but that, of course, is the point. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is famously described as a play where nothing happens, twice. In Summerfolk, nothing happens repeatedly, beautifully, endlessly. And by the curtain call, you realise with a faint chill that this, in fact, is everything.

Featured Image: Doon Mackichan, Sophie Rundle and Adelle Leonce. Photo by Johan Persson