{"id":1615,"date":"2012-03-21T11:36:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T10:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1240"},"modified":"2016-02-05T19:37:14","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:37:14","slug":"the-daughter-in-law-dhlawrence-lowry-theatre-salford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1615","title":{"rendered":"The Daughter-in-Law<\/em>, The Lowry, reviewed by Howard Booth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n
\nLawrence\u2019s play The Daughter-in-Law<\/em> 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\u2019t have the broader theatrical culture needed to do the work full justice.
\n
\nA 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\u2019s Gaiety Theatre, just failed to coincide with Lawrence\u2019s 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<\/em>. But Iden Payne had moved on from Manchester in 1911, and soon left the Manchester School behind as well. So The Daughter-in-Law<\/em>, written in the first 12 days of 1913, fell on stony ground. It went unperformed in Lawrence\u2019s lifetime.
\n
\nIn the 1930s Salford and Manchester again feature in the play\u2019s history. It received its first performances \u2013 under the title My Son\u2019s My Son<\/em> \u2013 in 1936 in a version by Walter Greenwood (of Love on the Dole<\/em> 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\u2019Casey had written in 1934, that Lawrence \u2018came into the theatre and the theatre received him not\u2019.
\n
\nIn 1965 The Daughter-in-Law<\/em> was finally published. The recognition of the play\u2019s importance soon followed when Peter Gill directed it at the Royal Court with the other two colliery plays \u2013 A Collier\u2019s Friday Night<\/em> and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd<\/em>. 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 \u2013 the director of this current production, Chris Honer, says that seeing Lawrence\u2019s work at the Royal Court left him with a longstanding desire to direct the play.
\n
\nRaymond Williams, introducing a Penguin edition of these plays in 1969, saw the three colliery plays as showing the possibility of \u2018a theatre of ordinary feeling raised to intensity and community by the writing of ordinary speech\u2019. He regrets that \u2018we have lost half a century\u2019. 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.
\n
\nIt 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 \u2013 and that then had to be challenged \u2013 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\u2019s 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.
\n
\nThis production by the Library Theatre had some excellent performances and evidence of much directorial thought. However, there were signs \u2013 and we can put this down to the wider context I have been elucidating \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t feel especially English at first \u2013 but then one realises that what is said to characterise the nation really only holds for one class and region.
\n
\nSusan Twist was a good Mrs Purdy, though she didn\u2019t have the appearance that Lawrence had in mind \u2013 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 \u2013 for example, \u2018I reckon he niver showed the spunk of a sprat-herring to \u2019er \u2013\u2019. The Minnie Gascoyne of Natalie Grady was carefully crafted \u2013 though Minnie, an aspiring servant girl with more than
\n\u00a3100 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.
\n
\nMy main problem was with Alun Raglan as Luther Gascoyne \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s lap. We were being asked: she may have her man, but is he, in the gender terms of the time, really<\/em> a man?
\n
\nBut 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 \u2013 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\u2019s shoes \u2013 before, indeed, the strain shows and he \u2018starts to cry\u2019. But rather than both Minnie and Luther being on the kitchen floor as was the case in this production, Lawrence\u2019s 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.
\n
\nIt 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<\/em> \u2013 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.
\n
\nHoward J. Booth<\/strong> lectures in modernist literature in the English and American Studies department at the University of Manchester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawrence\u2019s 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\u2019t have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Daughter-in-Law, The Lowry, reviewed by Howard Booth - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1615\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Daughter-in-Law, The Lowry, reviewed by Howard Booth - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Lawrence\u2019s play The Daughter-in-Law is widely held to be one of the most important British plays written between the 1890s and the 1950s. 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