SECOND HOME HOLIDAY HELL IN OLD RUSSIA
Watch a Chekhov play, and however deep the characters’ despair and disappointment you feel the author’s love, just as you do for the hopeless in Tennessee Williams. The laughter or headshaking dismay evoke pity, and are meant to.
This is not often the case in Checkhov’s contemporary and friend Maxim Gorky: a full-on awkward squad bolshevist with a fine and savage wit to flail the bourgeoisie. This massive attack, last at the National in 1999, has a cast of 23 from various families and linked businesses, and all but one of them are pretty deplorable. They’re having the summer months in their dachas, second homes for the affluent (very topical) and Peter McKintosh’s spare, woody set beautifully frames their world . First indoors – lots of terrace meetings and a bit of piano-strumming – and then in the second half a picnic by a real river: much hoiking up of gathered frocks and paddling. The least deplorable – though helpless – figure is Sophie Rundle’s gently stately Varvara, married to an oaf – Paul Ready bearding about in a manspreading spirit. Only she recognizes their untenable and illogical privilege in a deeply socially unfair country.
The story, insofar as there is one, deals with unsatisfied marriages – Kirill and Olga, Sid Sagar and Gwyneth Keyworth, very funny, she bemoaning her lot as a mother . There’s disappointment in Varvara’s former idol the writer Yakov, and the uselessness of mere words, with Doon McKichan as the spouting poet Kareiia, amusingly grim. They’re all convinced life is pointless, as indeed in most of their cases it is. Though at the picnic there’s a hopeless Mrs-Robinson passion from Alex Lawther’s quite sweet Vlass towards the baffled, outraged but receptive Maria. Who plays her feelings, again, pleasingly hilarious.
Indeed the company, with Nina and Moses Raine’s modernized language and Robert Hastie’s mischievously wild direction, all hurl themselves fullheartedly into the absurdities, rows, and general bourgeois entitlement to both luxury and selfpitying victimhood about life (still topical). All seem to realize that there’s a doom coming in the form of the Russian revolution – two rustic locals standd around, occasionally uttering a viewof the invading Summerfolk.
It’s nearly three hours, though, and there were periods when I didnt really want to be in their company, or care about them. But it’s fierily done, and ends with some admirable furious leaping on tables (just as there was round the corner in the Dorfman at Man and Boy till last week: what is this, a new rule under Indhu Rubasingham.? Every audition room with a table test to prove leapability?)
But a particular shout-out to that rising star Arthur Hughes as Petrov, the grumpy lumpen engineering boss . He has a particular lightness and humour in every part – his Richard III was fastastic – and here he gets to utter the ultimate upwardly-mobile capitalist’s great self- justification at the final dinner party, and shakes the rafters.. Bravo.
nationaltheatre.org.uk to 29 April
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