Maxim Gorky’s 1902 play is one of those seminal works we rarely get to see. Now it is being imaginatively paired and cross-cast with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904), in a season devoted to revolution. It’s an ambitious undertaking but, while I was glad to see Gorky’s great play, Helena Kaut-Howson’s production has yet to find its rhythm.
The setting is a dosshouse filled with the kind of drifters and derelicts Gorky had met on his travels through Russia: a stratum of society never before seen on stage. Fuelled by drink and dreams, they include a card sharp, a cap-maker, a locksmith, a self-styled baron and a thief called Vassily.
Two events stir these sad figures out of their inertia. One is the arrival of a tattered pilgrim, Luka, who offers them hope and tells them “whatever you believe in, exists”. The other is the violence that erupts when Vassily, who has been carrying on with the landlord’s wife, transfers his affection to her younger sister.
What strikes one instantly is the huge debt modern drama owes to Gorky. The battle between truth and lies visibly influenced O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh; Beckett and Pinter inherited Gorky’s sympathy with down-and-outs; and Alexander Zeldin’s Love, recently at the National, showed drama could be created out of the daily lives of forgotten people.
But, if Gorky’s play endures, it is not just because of the long shadow it casts: it is because of its blend of compassion and cruelty. We are moved by Luka’s Christian charity and by the hymn the card cheat, Satin, offers to humankind. Yet Gorky, the pioneering realist, also shows that deprivation breeds hard-heartedness. After the anguished death of the locksmith’s tubercular wife, the cap-maker’s only comment is: “Stopped her coughing, has she?”
Kaut-Howson’s production keeps the Russian setting but updates the action and sprays the translation by Jeremy Brooks and Kitty Hunter-Blair, commissioned for the 1972 RSC revival, with four-letter words. I have no big issue with that but a production that is spellbinding up to the interval later loses its momentum. Brooks called the play “a dark and brooding poem” but, especially in the scene where Luka’s vision of a utopian virtuous land is vehemently contradicted by the locksmith, Gorky’s rhythmic balance is undone by hesitant caesuras.
With cast of 18, it remains an impressive company show in which certain individuals stand out. Jim Bywater lends the philosophical Luka the wryness and charm of a Russian Alan Bennett, while Jack Klaff shrewdly reminds us that Satin’s great hymn to humanity comes from a brain befuddled by drink. There is strong support from Doug Rao as the lecherous thief, from Ruth Everett, vicious in leopardskin, as his rejected lover, and from Simon Scardifield as an alcoholic actor deluded by false hope. It makes for a long three-hour evening but, even if the production needs tightening, Gorky’s play is essential viewing for anyone interested in the origins of modern theatre.
• At the Arcola, London, until 11 February. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
