Summerfolk opened in St Petersburg in 1905 following the death of Chekhov and before the first Russian Revolution.
The mix of an impending political storm laced with Chekov’s views on social mobility and entitlement is all clearly recognisable.
In Robert Hastie’s finely tuned production, these upwardly mobile Russians are a notch away from Chekhov’s fading aristocrats. Their language is ballsier, their frustrations more urgent and the play is strikingly relevant.
The summerfolk have gathered to replenish their energies away from the city as they drift between neighbouring dachas on a development that feels like a sequel to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Lopakhin’s land grab.
A development of dachas is evoked through Peter McKintosh’s set of vaulted wooden planks and decking beside water where they picnic, paddle and fish.
The ensemble of 23 actors is perfectly cast. Paul Ready as gossipy lawyer Bassov married to remote, beautiful Varvara [Sophie Rundle] captures a man’s failings to fully comprehend his wife through his estuary twang and coarse laugh, thinly disguising his fury at her rejection.
Doon Mackichan as wide-eyed, aspiring poet Kaleria is brilliantly comic but poised, her arms ofttimes outstretched as if she’s awaiting a visitation.
Daniel Lapaine as the balding, uptight writer Shalimov barely attempts to conceal his bitterness, declaring, ‘Of course I’m disappointing, I’m human.’
Soft lighting by Paul Pyant brings requisite melancholy to the proceedings, at times throwing up haunting, threatening shadows.
The atmosphere compensates for the lack of any realist trees on stage; their culling having made space for this playground of layabouts. Some updates in language and swearing land with a thud.
These characters forget poems as soon as they’ve been recited, they declare love, botch suicide attempts, scrap, want sex, want money, project lofty ideals onto one another, weep and flounder when desires fade or random gunshots from the oppressed peasants circling their community shatter their fantasies.
They are stuck, fragmented and fearful. It’s very funny and very sobering.
