Lawrence’s play The Daughter-in-Law is widely held to be one of the most important British plays written between the 1890s and the 1950s. Productions are not exactly ten a penny, so this one by Library Theatre at the Lowry was very welcome. Though excellent in some respects it did show that we still don’t have the broader theatrical culture needed to do the work full justice.

A Manchester company staging the play in Salford reminds us of one of the most unfortunate near-misses in English theatre history. The Manchester School of Realism, as it came to be called, with its base at Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre, just failed to coincide with Lawrence’s talent. One of its major figures was the actor, director and producer Ben Iden Payne, and Lawrence had him in mind when writing The Daughter-in-Law. But Iden Payne had moved on from Manchester in 1911, and soon left the Manchester School behind as well. So The Daughter-in-Law, written in the first 12 days of 1913, fell on stony ground. It went unperformed in Lawrence’s lifetime.

In the 1930s Salford and Manchester again feature in the play’s history. It received its first performances – under the title My Son’s My Son – in 1936 in a version by Walter Greenwood (of Love on the Dole fame). It was premiered in London but then taken elsewhere, including performances at the Palace Theatre in Manchester in November. But it was still the case, as the Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey had written in 1934, that Lawrence ‘came into the theatre and the theatre received him not’.

In 1965 The Daughter-in-Law was finally published. The recognition of the play’s importance soon followed when Peter Gill directed it at the Royal Court with the other two colliery plays – A Collier’s Friday Night and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Gill clearly benefited from working on these plays with a group of actors over an extended period. Those who saw these performances speak very highly of them – the director of this current production, Chris Honer, says that seeing Lawrence’s work at the Royal Court left him with a longstanding desire to direct the play.

Raymond Williams, introducing a Penguin edition of these plays in 1969, saw the three colliery plays as showing the possibility of ‘a theatre of ordinary feeling raised to intensity and community by the writing of ordinary speech’. He regrets that ‘we have lost half a century’. If Lawrence had been performed and got an audience in the 1910s and 1920s, not only would he have written more plays and got them performed but there would have been wider implications for the British stage.

It is indeed a fascinating counter-factual. Had Lawrence the dramatist flourished the very structures of British theatre that solidified in the first half of the century – and that then had to be challenged – might never have formed. The theatre would always have been less London-centre, and without its class bias. There would be more variety in the repertoire and actors would be trained differently. Given Lawrence’s interest in Synge, Ibsen and Strindberg there would be a more secure tradition of dialogue with the rest of European theatre. And performing a Lawrence play would be something companies and actors were absolutely at ease with. We would not have that feeling of everyone being on a steep learning curve.

This production by the Library Theatre had some excellent performances and evidence of much directorial thought. However, there were signs – and we can put this down to the wider context I have been elucidating – that an initial familiarity with the idiom would have taken it even further. Diane Fletcher, playing Mrs Gascoyne, was the most impressive member of the cast; she has taken roles in Lawrence’s colliery plays before. Hers was the most secure accent and assured pacing. As Peter Gill showed, familiarity with the work in performance suggests that it should not be rushed, where the quality of the language and the ear for speech needs the space in which to tell. The various elements in play in Mrs Gascoyne’s character were gradually unfurled. Diane Fletcher also brought out the emotional grammar of the play, the way people fall out and fall back together. This doesn’t feel especially English at first – but then one realises that what is said to characterise the nation really only holds for one class and region.

Susan Twist was a good Mrs Purdy, though she didn’t have the appearance that Lawrence had in mind – lines about Mrs Purdy being fat had to be cut. Twist helped convey the sense of the rich social codes of this mining community. The Joe Gascoyne of Paul Simpson captured the somewhat childish swagger and wit of the younger son. Joe has many of the best lines, displaying, unlike his brother Luther, a talent for verbal play – for example, ‘I reckon he niver showed the spunk of a sprat-herring to ’er –’. The Minnie Gascoyne of Natalie Grady was carefully crafted – though Minnie, an aspiring servant girl with more than
£100 to her name, is not assuredly middle class, which was how she was played here. That said, it is now very difficult to convey all the complexities that once attended the boundary area between the respectable working class and the lower middle class.

My main problem was with Alun Raglan as Luther Gascoyne – or perhaps the way he played Luther was a directorial decision. (Raglan did though have the most problems sustaining a Nottinghamshire accent.) This Luther was fragile and simply not very bright. The words on the page suggest that he is not articulate, but he is hardly Minnie’s complete opposite. At the end of the play, she returns from a spending spree in the big city (Manchester again) having resolved that her money will no longer be a barrier between her and her husband. The reconciliation effected, we saw, in this production, Luther in floods of tears, his head in Minnie’s lap. We were being asked: she may have her man, but is he, in the gender terms of the time, really a man?

But that is to leave out the corresponding set of ambivalences present in what Lawrence wrote. Luther has been off with Joe frustrating the plans of the mine owners – there is a strike on, and the troops have been called in. Here the strike was rather played down, but it could well be said that Luther proves himself. If he is prepared to go out and take these risks perhaps Minnie does not really hold him. The final moments of the play have Minnie removing Luther’s shoes – before, indeed, the strain shows and he ‘starts to cry’. But rather than both Minnie and Luther being on the kitchen floor as was the case in this production, Lawrence’s stage directions have Luther sitting down, which means that Minnie is at his feet. Our final image of the couple suggests that Luther may after all be the dominant one.

It is true of course that a staging has to have a line. But if those fifty years Raymond Williams mentions had not been lost we might have productions able to carry even more of the complexity and ambivalence of The Daughter-in-Law – here specifically around the men as well as the women. All that said, the chance to see and think about this major play of the first half of the twentieth century was very welcome indeed.

Howard J. Booth lectures in modernist literature in the English and American Studies department at the University of Manchester.

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