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It's a hot, beautiful summer in 1905, and Russia's elite retreats to the countryside to swim, sip champagne and start affairs.
When you're having this much fun, why care about anything else? But Vavara can't shake the feeling that they're living on stolen time. How long can they go on ignoring the storm that's gathering on the horizon?
A razor-sharp portrait of class, privilege and denial, Summerfolk was written by Maxim Gorky in 1904. This adaptation by Nina Raine and Moses Raine premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2026, directed by Robert Hastie.
"Glorious…a bona fide hit…both touching and extremely funny…a play that blends laughter with tears."
—The Times
"Stunning…sumptuous…a bittersweet slice of turn-of-the-20th-century Russian life…brings shade and texture to Maxim Gorky's skewering of a feckless educated class, caught between Tsarism and the coming upheavals…Gorky's script has been given an idiosyncratic and often ribald updating that is hugely entertaining…pure pleasure."
—The London Standard
"Terrific…quotably funny…laced with a timely sense of collective dread."
—The Telegraph
"Strikingly modern…Gorky was writing in the shadow of Chekhov but these characters are rougher, more honest, maybe more real than anything you'll find in The Cherry Orchard."
—The Independent
"Brilliant…a pithy adaption of a play that literally picks up where Chekhov's masterpiece left off…the Raine siblings have provided a contemporary translation full of humour and vigour…Gorky's play speaks loudly to our careless times."
—WhatsOnStage
"A modern, witty and bracingly pungent adaptation."
—Time Out
"A play for today."
—Financial Times
"Seething with secret tensions and simmering resentments…captures the anxiety, humour and heartbreak of Maxim Gorky's piercingly prescient study of the indolence of the bourgeois."
—The Stage
"Gorky's self-deluding intelligentsia come under sharp comic scrutiny in an adaptation that emphasises the script's timelessness…the Raines have allowed contemporary resonances to speak for themselves, although they have trimmed the script and added a directness to some of the language…These people are heading for a tragedy that they seem to intuit but not understand, which makes them at least recognisable, even forgivable."
—The Arts Desk
"Nina and Moses Raine's version of Gorky's satire has a comic lilt, with added swearing and raunch—but is faithful to the original, sometimes to the letter."
—The Guardian
"Nina and Moses Raine's adaptation sparkles."
—BroadwayWorld
"A play ripe for revival, speaking clearly to the present moment."
—London Theatre
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gorky's works include: The Lower Depths, Twenty-six Men and a Girl, The Song of the Stormy Petrel, My Childhood, Mother, Summerfolk and Children of the Sun.