Review of the Week: Summerfolk at the National theatre

National Theatre, London, until 29 April

The socialist playwright Maxim Gorky wrote Summerfolk in the last summer before the 1905 revolution, hot and restless. The title is an insult – the name that surly locals called the bourgeoisie who flocked to their rural dachas on holiday in Tsarist Russia. A kind of furious sequel to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the play picks apart unhappy people in an unhappy nation, distracting themselves with sex, gossip, drinking and fishing rather than facing reality. They are tourists in not just their own country but their own lives: “the living dead”.

While Chekhov never seems to leave the stage, this logistically challenging tragicomedy of manners from his less timeless contemporary hasn’t been produced in the UK since 1999 and might seem like a tall order – but the National’s revival is a revelation. While wisely declining to update the setting in their adaptation, siblings Nina and Moses Raine shave an hour off the running time and make the remaining three go twice as fast by softening Gorky’s didacticism, modernising the language with Succession-style zip (I assume “wanking” is not from the original Russian) and liberally inserting very good jokes. A play with serious things to say about money, privilege, misogyny, literature and parenthood crackles with laughter.

And the cast! After seeing so many three-handers, two-handers and one-handers recently, it’s a thrilling luxury to witness a top-notch 23-person ensemble in a big theatre, expertly marshalled by director Robert Hastie, who launched the hit musical Operation Mincemeat. The characters reveal their frustrations and desires in shifting combinations, like dance partners whirling towards a climactic explosion. Honestly, I wouldn’t have complained about that extra hour.

Alex Lawther, who plays Vlass, recently compared Summerfolk to a novel or a TV boxset, teeming with life. Peter McKintosh’s warmly lit set is bucolic with a hint of decay, using timbers as both trees and the beams of an unfinished dacha, with a floor of planks painted forest-green. For the picnic centrepiece, where the whole cast comes together, he adds a moat-like stream to leap across or splash around in, although you’ll have to imagine the mosquitoes who represent the gathering masses. Preparations for a clearly half-arsed amateur production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream underline the sense of a world of illusion headed for a rude awakening. “Don’t you think it’s weird that we don’t all hate each other by now?” muses Sid Sagar’s frazzled doctor, Dudakov. Just you wait.

There are a lot of characters to meet but each one is oriented by a memorable entrance. Our hosts are oafish lawyer Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready) and his neurasthenic wife Varvara (Sophie Rundle, the play’s centre of gravity), to whom everybody brings their problems. Graduating from Motherland to the motherland, Ready gives us a crass, blaring fool (“I’m entertaining!” he keeps insisting) who never stiffens into caricature. Likewise Doon Mackichan as his sister, the wafty poet Kaleria, is a figure of fun whose terrible verses nonetheless stem from sincere angst. At the picnic she stands up, waves a bottle of wine and wails: “None of us is happy!” The play could be a demonstration of Tolstoy’s famous observation that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

So why so sad? The play offers competing theories. Compared by Bassov to a pen-knife and a machine-gun, the righteous doctor Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell) is the group’s nagging conscience, convinced that they cannot find peace so long as they seal themselves off from the Russian people. She finds a fellow malcontent in Lawther’s petulant Vlass, a scarecrow prophet of “looming doom” who copes by spraying contempt like a lawn sprinkler. In the opposite corner is Suslov (Arthur Hughes), a bullish bootstrap capitalist who believes he has earned the right to ignore the poor he has left behind. “The life of any thinking person is a tragedy,” says Kaleria. “We need oblivion,” offers Pip Carter’s hapless Ryumin. Discuss. Yet allusions to the language of social media suggest that their malaise has become a form of self-indulgence and their complaining an addictive hobby: they want their navel-gazing opinions to be liked and shared.

The characters are wildly enjoyable company for us, if not for each other, thanks to a chocolate box of delicious performances: Daniel Lapaine as Shalimov, a washed-up writer who despises the public for losing interest in him; Gywneth Keyworth as Olga, a bitterly reluctant mother who delights in finding people whose misery eclipses her own; Adelle Leonce as the flamboyantly unfaithful Yulia. “I’m beautiful,” she sighs. “That’s my problem.” If it wasn’t for the word count, I’d list them all.

When Summerfolk premiered in St Petersburg, it sparked generational warfare in the theatre and was soon banned. It’s unlikely that the National’s audience will feel quite so savagely indicted – this version is too funny, vibrant and humane – but the gnawing anxiety about how to lead a meaningful life in fraught times feels current. The summerfolk are all waiting for something to happen that will make sense of their aimless lives, even if that something is “a stronger, bolder lot of people” who will sweep them into the dustbin of history.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize.