Theatre
All too long a date
Kenneth HwTen
-surnmerfolk by Maxim Gorky: Royal Shakespeare Company Let My People Come by Earl (Aldwych)
Wilson, Jr (Regent)
David Jones, the RSC director who handled Enemies so superlatively three years ago, and elatedly but less prudently followed it with The Lower Depths (the excesses permitted the actors in that one have me cringing even in retrospect),. has taken the Gorky pitcher to the well yet again; and that makes it probably twice too often. It isn't that he has done this one badly. On the contrary, if Sumtnerfolk had to be done at all, it couldn't have been done much better; but it is a play which, unlike Enemies, seems well deserving of its long neglect, and there has to come a time when everybody stops kissing and being grateful for opportunities to see the minor botches of famous writers. (If such an eccentric academic interest is to be indulged, there must be plenty of awful English plays of the Edwardian period, but I don't• want to give -anybody any ideas.) Summerfolk stands in relationship of merit to Enemies and The Lower Depths as, asany PTIhaetocnhoevrry io rd
stands Seagull
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d Gorky is not actually to be compared with Chekhov, though he might well be compared with him, and I only mention the two Russians in the same breath as a good way of getting into the subject matter of Summerfolk. It is, indeed, the only way. Gorky's piece is -a bourgeois version of The Cherry Orchard with, as Edward Braun observes in a programme note, the Ranevskaya estate overrun by the newly emergent professional class, "as though Lopakhin had chopped down the cherry trees and built dachas down by the river." They preen themselves in their new prosperity and have mild pretensions to the New Intellectualism, but they lack the style for it These lawyers and doctors, these aspiring academics and litterateurs, are too inhibited by their humble origins to cut much of a social dash, and too lofty in their middle-class ambitions to find any point of identity with the revolutionary concepts seeping up from the proletariat. Instead they spend themselves as fecklessly as the exhausted aristocracy they are in course of supplanting; even their emotional relationships, disastrously untidy but too effete to be tragic, are like some ghastly parody of the doomed affairs of the gently-bred with whom Chekhov has familiarised us. This, anyway, is how Gorky saw them and they plainly depressed him no end. In the closing scenes of Summerfoik — a long three hours after the opening ones — he castigates them roundly in miserable lectures, all earnest breast-beating, delivered by the least endearing characters, whom I nevertheless took to be his own favourites. I'm sure I admired all the wrong people, though I didn't admire any of them very much, and there isn't a lot to choose in tiresomeness between the best and the worst of them. They also, I'm afraid, go on at quite inordinate length, musing and gossiping and philosophising, and any one of them could empty a bar or clubroom in ten minutes flat.
Still, it is decently done. The intellectual sprawl of the play — Gorky's view of Russian society, where it was going and where it should go, was always subject to alarming fluctuations — is discreetly minimised by Jones's smooth orchestration. The production is outstanding in its ensemble effects, the more remarkable in that it can also accommodate some brilliant soloists — like, for examples, Norman Rodway, as the shifty but rather breezy lawyer in and around whose villa it all takes place; and Ian Richardson, as a visiting novelist, somehow able to remark without a blush that he has "drunk the cup of loneliness to its bitter dregs"-• and the marvellous Margaret Tyzack as a middle-aged widow bravely renouncing romance with a lad half her age, coping with a predecament so hackneyed in its novelettishness that she could be congratulated for merely keeping a straight face, let
kJPeUtatOr September 7, 1974 alone tearing your heart out. Let My People Come is a strangely unsophisticated little show infatuated with the discovery of the pleasures of sex and speaking eagerly in favour of most of them; but not, unfortunately, very Maturely or attractively, and as an exercise in preaching to the converted (well, who else?) it is unengaging as well as footless.
Cinema
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