Summerfolk review – lazy days of passion and privilege at Gorky’s doomed dacha

Writers Nina and Moses Raine add comedy and raunch to Maxim Gorky’s satire of the holidaying elite

In 1898, Maxim Gorky wrote a fan letter to Anton Chekhov. Gorky was just starting out, and the leading light in Russian theatre convinced him to try his hand at plays. Summerfolk was written a few years later as a response to The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s elegiac last play about the downfall of the ruling class.

It features languid members of the elite gathering for the summer at a dacha belonging to Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready) and his wife, Varvara (Sophie Rundle). This setting is stunningly designed by Peter McKintosh as the exoskeleton of a house, rather like the construction of a draughtsman’s sketch in the middle of the woods.

The couple has invited guests who speak of love and life’s pointlessness as they picnic and sip champagne. The satire is less subtle than Chekhov’s and made more humorous in Robert Hastie’s period-dress production of this new adaptation by sibling playwrights Nina and Moses Raine. Their version has a comic lilt, with added swearing and raunch – but is faithful to the original, sometimes to the letter.

The first two acts bob along with breezy comings and goings in the dacha. There are occasional prickles as two watchmen stalk the dark edges of the house, where the forest lies – the invisible underclass made visible, coldly regarding the rich, wastrel summer-homers inside.

A renowned writer, Yakov Shalimov (Daniel Lapaine), is joining the guests and one plot line features a staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the forest; so there are reflections on the place of writing and in-jokes about theatre. It edges towards a parody of Chekhov, with its large cast of discontented characters (depressed or pompous men, bored or trapped women). These are shallow people, superficially portrayed – but a couple of scenes featuring Varvara’s oppressive marriage and anguish in love for the grey-haired doctor, Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell), bring a surge of emotional intensity. Women, on the whole, are compassionately presented; the men much more savagely satirised.

Summerfolk takes on more texture after the interval, as the set opens up to a glorious symbolic forest, a kind of Arden in imperial Russia. There is more emotional drama between couples and moments when the satire gleams, such as when the poet of the group, Kaleria (Doon Mackichan), dismisses talk of suffering and hardship for people beyond her privileged class by exclaiming: “What about poetry?”

There appears to be a nod to Uncle Vanya in the unrequited love story between Maria and the young clerk, Vlass (Alex Lawther). This plotline almost steals the show. Mitchell and Lawther are wonderful at depicting tormented love with a comedic bent, and there is an incredibly tender moment between Maria and daughter Sonya (Tamika Bennett) in which she urges her mother to follow her heart.

Chekhov’s gun looms, too, but Gorky’s characters are self-made (like himself) rather than landed gentry. “We, who are children of washerwomen, cooks and healthy workmen, should be different,” says Maria in the original play, but they are still shallow and dissolute, here declaring their nature with self-excoriating summaries of themselves. The production offers a more ominous ending than the original, with the rebellious forces – which would culminate in the 1917 Russian Revolution – closing in around them.

At almost three hours, it is ambling but with sparks of intensity – rather like a summer’s day. One character gives a hostile review of The Cherry Orchard: “Went on too long. Didn’t like it.” This goes on a little too long as well, although it is likable enough.

• At the Olivier theatre, National Theatre, London, until 29 April.