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Contents: October 16, 1999:
Jennifer Ehle and Derbhle Crotty are bored ladies in "Summerfolk." (Photo: photo Catherine Ashmore)
(1)The Royal National Theatre's "Summerfolk."
(2)The Royal National Theatre's "Money."
"Summerfolk"
As characters move in and out of Bassov's dacha and the surrounding forest, as conversations ebb and flow, the mood changing with the light, and you get a growing, gripping sense of the spiritual aimlessness and desolation that afflicts the new middle class of Russia in the prelude to revolution.
By Maxim Gorky, adapted by Nick Dear, directed by Trevor Nunn with Fiona Buffini
Produced by the Royal National Theatre
South Bank
171 452-3400
Opened September 3, 1999
Closes November 23, 1999
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar September 20, 1999In this version of Gorky's 1904 play, "Summerfolk," director Trevor Nunn and adapter Nick Dear give an utterly modern feel to the tale of self-absorbed people who've risen out of poverty and don't give a care a damn about those they've left behind.
Nunn brilliantly directs the ensemble in a naturalistic style with rich, complex performances, with the actors' every movement, gesture, and glance dramatizing the ordinary yet portentous characters of their lives. They are symbolic personalities, but also individually deeply real. And the sensibilities that are drawn could just as well inhabit modern upwardly mobile professionals who spend their lives in narrow self-interest, oblivious to and unconcerned with the condition of the wretchedly poor.
The round stage holds a garden, with birches, rattan furniture, a piano, at the back the entrance to the house, to the right a study. All is framed by matted clumps of green and dried grass, a rich complex tapestry in drab earth colors. Violin music evokes Russian folk songs.
Several families are spending the summer in a community of dachas, some of the men commuting from work in the city. The men include a lawyer, engineer, doctor, a local official. Their parents had been poor. Gorky was building on a real social phenomenon. After Russia's defeat in the Crimean War in 1953, Czar Alexander II realized that the backwardness of his country was to blame. He emancipated the serfs, created local government councils, doubled financing for universities and increased the numbers of students, including those from poor backgrounds. Children of the lower classes could become professionals.
Then in 1881, Alexander II was assassinated, and the next czar, Alexander III, declared a state of emergency and increased repression. As movements for reform and revolution gathered strength, people chose sides. Gorky was for radical change.
The play's setting was inspired by a summer the author spent at a dacha outside Nijni Novgorod in 1902. He had arrived to find rusted tins and waste paper left by the tenants of the year before, and he wrote, "The summer visitor is the most useless and perhaps the most harmful individual on earth; he descends on a dacha, fouls it up with rubbish and then leaves."
That experience must have exacerbated the contempt he felt for the nouveau riche. In "Summerfolk," a handful of sensitive, progressive people -- mostly women -- are outnumbered by vulgar, self-centered bougeois who are consumed with their own little affairs, gripes and jealousies as they talk and snipe at each other over tea, picnics and dinner. The men treat the women with contempt.
These new rich lack the culture of the aristocrats they are emulating. The lawyer Sergei Bassov is given life by Roger Allam as a flippant, anti-intellectual with a lower-middle class British accent and demeanor. His wife Varya (the excellent Jennifer Ehle) is bored and dissatisfied. She looks forward with secret hope to the visit of Shalimov, the famous writer she idolized as a student. But he is cynical and can't write, because he can't understand what's going on in the world.
Sergei's sister Kaleria (Derbhle Crotty) is a pretentious, self-dramatizing woman who composes New Age-style drivel about sunrises and sunsets. She declares equitable redistribution to be cold and unpoetic.
Sergei's rich uncle Semyon Dvoetochie (Michael Bryant) advises that "Riding around on your neighbors back is the only way to travel." He's a womanizer, too, and jokes that he seduces then and then they either die or run off. He calls them "an inferior species," and Sergei agrees that they need a strong hand.
Sergei's friend, engineer Piotr Suslov, given a dark, brooding sensibility by Oliver Cotton, is a crude, violent, boorish drunk committed to the defense property and privilege against the incursions of the masses. His wife Yulia (Victoria Hamilton) despises him. When Piotr declares to his giddy, unfaithful wife, "I'll shoot you one day, she replies, "I'm free on Tuesday. Is that any good?"
Little touches show the cruelty and blindness of the middle class. The frightened maid wails that a little servant boy ran away from kitchen, and "they'll thrash him." Sergei declares, as he gives money to a beggar, "I still can't grasp the nature of the problem." Sergei sees himself as a man of goodwill who will change the fabric of society gradually.
Vlass (Raymond Coulthard), Varya's charming, insouciant brother, has contempt for the society of parvenus he inhabits, and at one point ridicules their pretensions them by switching his accent between Cockney and French.
All the women are dissatisfied. Kaleria frets, "I don't think I can love at all. I shall die unmarried." Yulia interjects, "Oh god, it's not all it's cracked up to be."
Olga Dudakova, the complaining lower middle class housewife, played with comic pathos by Beverley Klein as someone "desperate to live," irritates her husband Kirill Dudakov (portrayed sensitively by Simon Russell Beale), a distraught, unhappy doctor, who declares, "I find it remarkable we don't loath each other, we hollow men; we feel quite empty inside." Neither of them understands the other's pain, which is undermining their marriage.
Varya, realizing the reason for her own ennui, tries in vain to persuade everyone that "It can't be good to live in a society where we worry about ourselves and contribute precisely nothing."
But Gorky also creates personages he admires. Maria Lvovna (Patricia Hodge), the socialist doctor says, "We're the children of cooks and laundry-women and decent working people. We have a duty to be different! Never before has our great country had an educated bourgeoisie with direct blood ties to the working class. Those ties should feed us, should plant in us a burning desire to improve and regenerate and illuminate the lives of our own people -- people who toil and toil, till the day they die, trapped in dirt and darkness."
Instead, she says, the poor "look back on us with sheer hatred, because we're the enemy, because we live well on the fruits of their labor. She also declares that a writer should be spokesmen for truth and decency, a fighter for our rights, obviously the description of how Gorky saw himself.
The prescription is clear. Young Sonya, Maria Lvovna's giggly daughter, and her boyfriend, Maxim Zimin (Jack James), an aggressive working-class fellow who talks about class solidarity, will struggle for change. Sonya declares, "Max and I will finish our studies and then we'll all live together and work! Work to change the world!"[Komisar]
"Money"
The National Theatre is presenting a clever, witty, satirical send-up of greed, duplicity and hypocrisy by a 19th century playwright most Americans have never heard of. It is "Money," by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a political reformer, writer and politician, and a friend and soulmate of Charles Dickens. The play was first produced in 1840 at the Haymarket Theatre in London and had an immediate success.
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton, directed by John Caird
Produced by the Royal National Theatre
South Bank
171 452-3400
Opened June 3, 1999
Closes November 13, 1999
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar September 9, 1999Bulwer-Lytton shows an English society at its middle levels made up of impecunious aristocrats and aspiring mercantile and political climbers, all of them seduced by the glitter of wealth and terrified at falling into poverty. He'd had a problem with money himself when he married against his mother's wishes and was temporarily estranged from family and allowance. To make a living, he became a prolific writer of novels and nonfiction, most famously "The Last Days of Pompeii." Entering parliament in 1831, he was a supporter of the Reform Bill that extended franchise to male property owners -- ie. the middle classes, and an advocate of reform of the factory and poor laws. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
John Caird stages the play with period costumes on a simple circular platform furnished only with a dozen upholstered gilt chairs and a round French provincial table, representing the stylish pretensions of the characters. (The set is by Rob Howell.) A diaphanous backdrop is lit with changing colors by Peter Mumford, and the platform is ringed with burned bits of chairs and pillows and shards of metal, the debris of a decaying civilization. Jonathan Dove's harpsichord, harmonium, cello and horn music is Felliniesque.
A very rich man has died, and his friends and relations are salivating over the will. His poor cousin Alfred Evelyn (Simon Russell Beale), the only decent fellow around, loves Clara Douglas (Victoria Hamilton), companion to Lady Franklin (Patricia Hodge), but she rejects him, because she believes that marrying in poverty will make them both miserable and will drag him down, as it did her father. Alfred, who appears generally depressed, is pretty much ignored by everyone else.
Sir John Vesey (Dennis Quilley), who is Lady Franklin's brother, is looking around for a financially advantageous match for his empty-headed, pouty daughter Georgina (Sopie Okonedo). He has no money of his own, but he seeks to promote the idea that he is rich by paying a fellow to go around town and complain he is stingy. ("Men are valued not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.") Alfred writes Vesey's speeches and reports.
Comes the reading of the will and Alfred gets the estate. Clara urges him to use his fortune for good, to "do justice to your own nature" and rise to a nobler self. They both seem too pig-headed to revisit their thwarted romance. There follows a dance of pretension and dissembling as the rest of society is intent in getting part of the loot.
Alfred, who has fallen into cynicism, pronounces his belief in the "the greatest happiness of the greatest number and the greatest number is number one." And, "In this world, the only way to make oneself thoroughly respectable is to make a thoroughly respectable show." He starts to spend money like water, to the initial pleasure of the local tailor, architect, upholsterer, silversmith, portrait painter, horse-dealer and other tradesmen. Is there a method to this madness?
On the rebound, Alfred lets himself be maneuvered into an engagement with Georgina, who is much more the soul-mate of Sir Frederick Blunt (Simon Day), a foppish blonde dandy in long blue coat, pink pants, vest and gloves.
Then he starts to gamble, and the hangers-on worry about whether he can pay his bills or spread his wealth in their direction. Still, he seems disgusted with those around him. When someone announces news from the east, Alfred comments, "Yes all the wise men have gone back there."
Along the way, we get also some pungent social comments such as "A lady is educated to sing, dance, and walk well into a room," and "Free the poor into the poorhouse." There's also a subplot about the corruption of politics and society: "The man who steals knows a man who diverts water from his neighbor." And a crucial lesson about the manipulation of bank accounts.
It's all a bit hokey, a melodramatic morality play with speeches to the audience. Caird directs the actors in performances that are charming and luminous -- stylized but also understated. When Alfred rejects an attempt to buy him off, he declares, "At the moment my politics I regret to say is to consider what is best for the country." He grimaces. Beale is a splendid contradictory Alfred, self-absorbed and generous at the same time.
Patricia Hodge as Lady Franklin is a wonderfully dark black widow, with a hint of Slavic angst. Victoria Hamilton's Clara is the prototypical kind, selfless ingenue, almost too self-abnegating for this world. They may be Victorian stock characters, but they delight the viewer in Bulwer-Lytton's play no less than comparable personages do in the books of his good friend Charles Dickens.[Komisar]
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