Summerfolk

 

The National Theatre play Summerfolk  which youngest sister, mrs maytrees and I attended at the Olivier Theatre earlier this week, played to a packed audience and was excellent.

We decided to have lunch at the NT cafe which was inexpensive though perhaps understandably somewhat crowded. The play and lunch were our bithday present to youngest sister who reaches her 70th birthday this month.

Coincidentally I am reading the recently published book Rasputin and the Downfall of  the Romanovs by Antonoy Beever. Both the play and the book are for the most part set in the early 1900s. I will probably make a blog post about the book in a few days time.

Summerfolk was  a long play which rewarded concentration. There was a large cast of some twnty three characters.

An extract from a review of the play in the Radio Times reads:

Gorky's work deals with the preoccupations of the intelligentsia right before the Russian Revolution; affairs, loveless marriages, opinions on lacklustre poetry. At times, we the audience, as a fly on the wall, can see deeper into the darker side of the upper middle class psyche of the time; from the male characters' rampant misogyny to Pyotr's disdain for his own working class origins.

Gorky and the Raine siblings have worked in tandem to create a hilarious and affecting script, stuffed with terrific one-liners and expertly-placed expletives, without shying away from the darker elements.

It's impossible not to draw parallels between Summerfolk's underlying sense of political and social unease and the churning anxiety present in our current world. These eerie similarities mean that this contemporary production speaks to the timelessness of theatre.

Despite being reduced by an hour, Summerfolk still boasts a hefty run-time. While the first half effortlessly flies by, the production begins to show its runtime more in the second half, as repeated arguments lead it to losing a little steam.

An excellent afternoon.