Writer: Maxim Gorky, adapted by Nina Raine and Moses Raine
Director: Robert Hastie
Summerfolk should have been a home run for the National Theatre, and everything about it should showcase what the venue does best: big classic works given a new lease of life, a large complex cast of characters battling internal and external forces taking place on a huge canvas of a set that fills the Olivier stage. Yet this rather serviceable adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s play by brother and sister writers Nina Raine and Moses Raine feels completely disjointed, with all its elements pulling in lots of different directions. So as the characters ponder the purpose of their lives, the audience is left to wonder about the purpose of the play.
A group of ‘summerfolk’, tourists renting seasonal houses in the Russian countryside, begin to tire of each other as rounds of teas, picnics and parties only expose their idleness and suffocation. At the centre is Varvara, who dreams of a better life and better people while enduring the gossipy smallness of her neighbours. When her favourite writer joins the group, her hopes are soon dashed as everyone’s summer comes to an abrupt end.
Peter McKintosh has done a very fine job in staging the four acts of Summerfolk, designing a slightly deconstructed series of rooms in which the story’s many rounds of conversation take place, suggesting an open breeziness that we have come to associate with the National Theatre’s approach to Russian drama. The setting for the third act, in particular, is delightful, a picnic with decking and a small stream, an expanse of hot countryside with plenty of nooks for private chats and confederacies to occur while still suggesting the sweaty exhaustion and rising tempers of continual contact. McKintosh’s costumes are equally evocative, all beautiful linen and lace, redolent of the restrictive Edwardian era of Gorky’s original.
Yet the adaptation itself fails to conjure up any of the magic. There are too many characters to keep track of, and under Hastie’s direction, they float across the action rather than forming the substance of it. Love stories, complaints, family angst and class conflict drive particular individuals, but none are drawn in sufficient detail to elicit any deeper meaning, while the emptiness of their lives, which the group discuss endlessly, never forms into any deeper reflection or who they represent today. There are lots of big themes here about coping with class transitions across generations raised from the working class (sadly, the actual working classes are caricatured extras), the judgmental restrictions placed on women expected to be quiet, grateful wives and saintly mothers, as well as the false promise of poetry and celebrity in a mercantile world. Yet none is served beyond a glib joke or two.
The Raines’ adaptation uses contemporary language, which jars against McKintosh’s detailed scenario creation, and is frequently quite basic and crass, taking opportunities to poke fun at the characters we’re never encouraged to like instead of trying to understand them. Only Sophie Rundle’s excellent Varvara stands out; the one person who gives little away easily becomes the most sympathetic and the most real. Elsewhere, there are moments that land, including the longing between Jutine Mitchell’s Maria Lvovna and her much younger lover Vlass (Alex Lawther), while Gwyneth Keyworth gets lots of laughs as a sulkily burdened mother who says all the wrong things, but Summerfolk only ever manages to be an anthology of incomplete stories of incomplete characters living incomplete lives.
Runs until 29 April 2026
