By Sara Bright
There is a distinct, heavy hum that settles over the Olivier Theatre just before the house lights go down. It is a sound unique to the institutional strongholds of British culture – a collective exhalation of the comfortable classes preparing to be intellectually stimulated, provided the stimulation concludes in time for the last train from Waterloo. It is the sound of a thousand people shifting in their plush seats, folding their expensive coats over their laps, and sipping the last of their overpriced gin and tonics. We sit in the brutalist concrete belly of the South Bank, safe, sheltered, and entirely comfortable. It is a fittingly insulated vantage point from which to watch the slow, beautifully dressed collapse of an entire social class.
The National Theatre’s current offering, running until the end of April, is a revival of Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk. As the expansive Olivier stage is revealed in all its cavernous, terrifying glory, we are immediately transported to the oppressive, sticky heat of rural Russia in the summer of 1905. The visual language is immediate, tactile, and highly seductive. There is dappled light filtering through the suggestion of towering silver birches. There are crisp white linen suits, the rhythmic, hollow pop of champagne corks, the languid stretching of limbs after a long, cool swim in the river. It looks, at first glance, like a paradise of leisure. You can almost smell the pine needles, the damp earth, and the expensive tobacco, a sensory illusion so complete it momentarily lulls the auditorium into a state of uncritical envy. It is an aesthetic triumph, of course, but it is also a deliberate trap.
Maxim Gorky was never an artist interested in pastoral idylls, and this 2026 production makes no attempt to hide the damp rot beneath the polished floorboards of the dacha. The holidaymakers we observe – the lawyers, doctors, writers, and their spouses – are the newly minted intelligentsia, the emerging middle and upper-middle class of a rapidly industrialising nation. These are men and women who have hauled themselves up from the peasantry or the working classes through education and professional ambition. Having finally secured their financial and social status, they find themselves utterly marooned. They belong neither to the ruling aristocracy, who despise them as parvenus, nor to the proletariat, whom they now view with a mixture of guilt and distaste.
To mask this profound social and spiritual displacement, they have escaped the stifling heat of the city to play at being country squires. They fill their endless, stretching days with amateur theatricals, verbose philosophical debates, and clumsy, desperate affairs. Watching them is rather like observing a colony of beautifully plumed birds squabbling over seeds while a forest fire quietly, inexorably accelerates in the distance.
At the centre of this manic, forced gaiety is Varvara. She operates as the moral and emotional barometer of the piece, the only individual on stage who seems capable of hearing the low, rumbling frequency of the approaching storm. While her peers engage in endless, circular arguments about the meaning of art, the necessity of progress, and the vague “purpose” of the intelligentsia, Varvara possesses a quiet, terrifying clarity. She understands that this entire existence is a fiction built on borrowed time.
The production brilliantly highlights this temporal anxiety. The pacing of the long summer days feels deliberately stretched, creating a languor that borders on clinical paralysis. The peasants who fetch their water, sweep their verandas, and quietly clear their discarded plates are ever-present on the fringes of the stage, yet entirely unacknowledged by the holidaymakers. They move like silent, judging ghosts in the background, but their physical presence is a constant, heavy accusation. Varvara watches her friends drink, flirt, and pontificate, and she sees only phantoms pretending to be alive. She knows that the structure supporting their leisure is inherently unstable, that the foundation is cracking under the weight of their collective apathy and willful blindness.
This sense of creeping, inescapable dread is masterfully handled by Robert Hastie, the National Theatre’s Deputy Artistic Director. Directing Summerfolk is notoriously a logistical labyrinth; it is a sprawling, chaotic ensemble piece where multiple, often contradictory conversations happen simultaneously, and characters are constantly wandering in and out of the surrounding woods. Hastie, however, uses the vast, intimidating scale of the Olivier to his distinct advantage.
Instead of trying to shrink the play to fit a conventional domestic drama, he aggressively expands it. He creates a staging that feels frighteningly porous, where the outside world – the dense, dark forest, the unseen, impoverished villages – is always threatening to bleed into the protected, manicured enclave of the dacha. The characters are frequently dwarfed by the vertical space above them, emphasising their smallness, their ultimate irrelevance in the face of historical inevitability. You can physically feel the claustrophobia of the open air; the horizon itself seems to be closing in on them, squeezing the oxygen from their privileged lungs.
The new adaptation by Nina Raine and Moses Raine is the crucial engine driving this delicate balancing act. They have meticulously brushed away the museum dust that so often accumulates on early twentieth-century Russian texts in British translation. They understand that theatrical translation is not merely about finding equivalent words, but about finding equivalent social frequencies. The language they have crafted is sharp, fiercely modern without resorting to the jarring, cheap trick of contemporary slang, and laced with a biting, cynical wit.
The Raines understand implicitly that these characters are not grand tragic figures carved from marble. They are ordinary, flawed, deeply selfish people who are utilising their considerable intellects primarily to justify their own inaction. The dialogue crackles with the frantic, exhausting energy of people who are talking simply to avoid listening to the silence. When the characters debate philosophy, it is not a genuine search for truth, but a competitive sport designed to pass the time before dinner. Their words are sophisticated shields, held up against the terrifying realisation of their own utter uselessness.
It is entirely impossible to sit in the Olivier Theatre in the spring of 2026 and not feel the uncomfortable, persistent prickle of recognition. That is the true, devastating power of this specific production. It absolutely refuses to grant us the comforting, anesthetic distance of historical hindsight. We, the audience, know exactly what happened to the Russian elite in the years immediately following 1905. We know about the violent revolutions, the total collapse of the empire, the blood that would eventually soak those picturesque birch forests. We know that the woods surrounding their beautiful summer homes were soon filled with something far more dangerous than bored lovers seeking a secluded spot.
But as we watch them willfully ignore the blazing signs of their impending obsolescence, the theatrical mirror slowly, inevitably turns toward the auditorium. We, the audience – with our interval drinks, our rustling programmes, our property portfolios, and our comfortable, secure lives – are the modern summerfolk.
We exist in a world marked by widening, increasingly grotesque social and economic inequality. We consume the daily news of collapsing ecosystems, of political infrastructures buckling under the weight of populism, of a financial divide that grows sharper by the hour. We retweet our outrage, we curate our moral indignation for public consumption, and then we book our holidays to the Mediterranean. We argue about aesthetics, morality, and the nuances of culture over dinner parties, while the world outside our double-glazed windows grows increasingly volatile. The play does not need to awkwardly update its setting to make this point; the resonance is deafening precisely because human psychology, in the face of systemic collapse, remains stubbornly unchanged.
The production sharply highlights the function of pleasure not as a joy, but as a powerful anesthetic. The romantic entanglements and infidelities that thread through the narrative are not driven by grand, sweeping passion. They are driven by an acute, crushing boredom and a desperate need to feel something – anything – other than a vague, creeping guilt. A stolen kiss behind a tree, a melodramatic declaration of love, a petty rivalry over a game of croquet; these are all infinitely easier to manage than the realisation that your entire way of life is built upon the back-breaking, invisible labour of an underclass you refuse to acknowledge.
The champagne flows constantly throughout the performance, not in celebration, but in a frantic, thirsty attempt to keep the dread at bay. The characters drink to blur the sharp edges of reality, to maintain the fragile illusion that the summer will last forever.
Hastie draws out magnificent, deeply nuanced performances from his ensemble cast, ensuring that no one is reduced to a mere caricature of privilege. We see the writer, Shalimov, obsessed with his own waning relevance, desperately seeking validation from a reading public he secretly despises. He is the patron saint of the modern op-ed columnist, terrified that the cultural conversation has moved on without his permission. We see the lawyer, utterly disconnected from any tangible concept of justice, treating the law as a bloodless intellectual game. We see the doctor, numbed to the physical suffering he is supposed to heal, retreating into a impenetrable shell of cynical detachment. They are all desperately trying to convince themselves that they matter, that their existence has weight and purpose. But every laugh we hear sounds slightly hollow, and every grand philosophical monologue eventually dissolves into petty bickering and bruised egos.
There is a specific moment late in the play that perfectly encapsulates the entire, quiet tragedy of the piece. The lighting design subtly shifts, moving from the bright, unforgiving, washed-out glare of midday to the long, melancholy shadows of late afternoon. The manic, exhausting energy of the party finally begins to flag. The characters are draped across the stage furniture, visibly exhausted by the sheer, sustained effort of their own leisure. Their pristine white linen suits are now creased, damp with sweat, and slightly soiled at the hems.
For a brief, terrifying second, the ambient noise of the country ceases. The birdsong cuts out, the music stops, the endless, overlapping conversation dies away, and the characters are forced to look at one another in utter, unbroken silence. In that heavy stillness, the air seems to physically thicken. You can almost feel the barometric pressure drop in the auditorium. It is the moment they all realise, but cannot say aloud, that the party is over. In that silence, one can almost hear the distant, rhythmic thud of marching boots, the inevitable, unfeeling march of history coming to sweep them all away.
It is a profound testament to the National Theatre’s current programming that Summerfolk feels so urgently, painfully necessary right now. It is not, by any metric, a comforting evening of theatre. It does not offer neat solutions to the systemic issues it raises, and it certainly does not offer its audience absolution. It simply presents a beautifully rendered, microscopically detailed portrait of a society dancing on the edge of a precipice, willfully, stubbornly blind to the sheer drop below.
Leaving the theatre and walking out into the cool, damp London night, the contrast between the world of the play and the physical reality of the city is stark, yet unsettlingly parallel. The Thames slides darkly past the heavy, water-stained concrete pillars of the South Bank. The illuminated, jagged skyline of the City rises on the opposite bank, a towering monument to global capital, glittering, imposing, and seemingly permanent.
The audience spills out onto the riverside walkways, wrapping scarves tightly around their necks, checking their phones for unread messages, hailing cabs to carry them back to their comfortable, secure homes in the leafier postcodes. We return to our own lives, returning to the comfort of our own constructed dachas, but we carry the unease of the performance with us. It is a quiet, nagging suspicion, settling somewhere deep in the chest, that our own summer, too, is drawing to a close, and that the long, dark winter is already waiting patiently in the wings.
