The bourgeoise have been given a bad press by great artists. For the Spanish surrealist film-maker Luis Buñuel they were shallow, hapless victims of circumstance who despite sitting around a dining table found it impossible to get dinner.
They didn’t fair any better in Stephen Sondheim’s final musical Here and Now, which received its UK premiere at the National and was inspired by Buñuel. And now here they are, back at the venerable venue in Maxim Gorky’s 1905 full-frontal attack on the demographic.
His play is a response to Chekhov’s much more sympathetic The Cherry Orchard, which was written just two years earlier. Gorky’s by contrast is a deeply unflattering portrait of feckless privilege and predicts the class is a doomed soon-to-be-extinct species.
Robert Hastie’s production swerves any temptation to deploy Chekhovian tropes. There is no samovar bubbling in the corner. The silver birch forest that so often forms the backdrop to Russian drama is depicted here as a copse of plain-sawn soaring timbers. Indeed Peter McKintosh’s design is an exhibition of carpentry, from the wooden bare beams and walls of the dacha owned by wealthy lawyer Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready) to the planks of boardwalks that serve as the forest floor for the exterior scenes. This is where Bassov’s fellow nouveau-riche friends and his family gather during steaming hot Russian summers.
The air is as heavy with dissatisfaction as it is humidity. Served by the deadpan working classes as if they are fattening up their employers before slaughter, Gorky’s bourgeoisie are an irredeemably self-pitying bunch who complain about the shallowness of life yet do nothing to deepen it.
For Ready’s guffawing Bassov everything is as it should be. Or it would be if only his wife Varvara (Sophie Rundle) didn’t have such disdain for him and their peers. In the age of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor it is easy to see in these early 20th-century Russians who are disconnected from the rest of their society, our own privileged classes. Except it is difficult to imagine our lot tormented by the idea of living a life without meaning. Certainly this new translation by Nina Raine and her brother Moses makes us think about the here and now as much Russia then. Their script captures the sense of being on the brink of massive and possibly violent change, and also the condition of being helpless to do anything about it.
Once again Ready, who is best known as the cuddly, harmless hand-flapper Kevin in the TV comedy Motherland, shows a pitiless malign side to his acting talents just as he did with his Macbeth and his Cardinal in Zinnie Harris’s version of The Duchess of Malfi.
Rubbed the wrong way his avuncular Bassov reveals a bitter mean streak. Also excellent is Alex Lawther as his lovelorn brother-in-law Vlass who worships the ground the older doctor Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell) walks on even though she is old enough to be his mother.
That she loves him too makes the relationship no more possible, no less tragic and their desperation no less funny. Yet ours is an uneasy laughter, as if we know that a version of the drastic change that is coming for them is also coming for us.
Summerfolk
National Theatre
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