Reviews West End & Central Published 31 October 2015

Husbands and Sons

National Theatre ⋄ 19th October - 10th February 2016

Community.

Tim Bano
The husbands and sons of a work equally, or more so, about wives and daughters.

The husbands and sons of a work equally, or more so, about wives and daughters.

On Google maps the buildings poke up in 3D while the streets remain flat, their names imprinted in big letters. Bunny Christie’s set seems to draw on this aesthetic to create a small, early twentieth century village – Eastwood in Nottinghamshire – three houses nestled against each other with the family’s name printed in big letters on the floor and furniture – stove, sink, tables – poking upwards from these architectural floor plans.

The sense it gives is one of community. It’s an entirely fabricated community: Ben Power has woven three DH Lawrence plays into one whole, three families’ stories played out over a few days and nights. There’s the Gascoignes, consisting of a newlywed girl who has to keep house for her husband and fend off her protective mother in law; the Holroyds, a woman with a young son and alcoholic husband; and the Lamberts, a mother coming to terms with her son outgrowing his need for her advice or her company.

All three families are miner families. The men return from the pit caked in coal dust. They demand supper, they mete out the housekeeping money, they drink and stink and prop up the patriarchy. But this isn’t about them. The title is a provocation by Power that this play isn’t really husbands and sons, it’s wives and mothers. It’s the wives and mothers, too, who put in the best performances.

The internal struggle between fidelity to a shit of a husband or eloping to Spain with the electrician is played out in Anne Marie duff, delivering each of her lines in an unexpected way. Louise Brealey seems timid and nervous, but when she needs to shout back at her husband she really gives it some welly. Julia Ford is worn by straitened finances, anxiety riven across her weary face.

Everything in this tired old town has the sense of just settling. Women who’ve settled for men, someone to share a bed with and to cook for. Men who’ve settled for jobs in the pit, something that puts food on the table. Subsistence is hard and repetitive, but not entirely joyless. In the cold world these people inhabit, there is affection and even love.

It’s a fabricated community – not only invented by Lawrence, and thrown together by Power, but fabricated as all neighbourhoods are. Complete strangers kept apart by a party wall. Close knit because there’s no other choice. You can hear the screams of neighbours and their fights and their business. It takes a tragedy to bring it all together for the good.

My parents hated our old neighbours, in the way that reasonable people turn to anger when their parking space has been taken or their light blocked out by an unapproved conservatory. Then one day, when the neighbour’s kids were little, their mum fell in the shower. The daughter rang on our bell and my mum was in there like a shot to help.

These Eastwood families let their tensions bubble in their own pots, let the gases build in their own pits, occasionally spilling out onto the street, occasionally raising an eyebrow from next door neighbours peeking through the curtains. They share a dunny.

Without walls, the design lets the subtle differences between the families niggle for us to notice: the Gascoignes have a gramophone and upholstered dining chairs. The Lamberts have bought kernels as a treat. The Holroyds have nothing.

It lags at times, the dense prose making the three hour play suffer rather than sing, but the slowness also lets this community bed in to the dark Dorfman stage, like the damp that’s wormed its way into their clothing and the coal flecks that have embedded themselves deep in the skin of these men and the fabric of their houses.

Men work hard, women nag. It’s life back then. But the darkness, the glow that comes from the metal grilles under the characters’ feet, the anxious expressions that tell of end of tethers all suggest something on the cusp.

Electricity is beginning to spark in the background, ready to come in and change all of their lives. Ready to make it all a bit easier.

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Tim Bano

Tim is a freelance arts writer and theatre critic. He writes regularly for Time Out, The Stage and other publications. He is co-creator of Pursued By A Bear, Exeunt Magazine's theatre podcast.

Husbands and Sons Show Info


Directed by Marianne Elliott

Written by DH Lawrence, adapted by Ben Power

Cast includes Anne-Marie Duff, Louise Brealey, Julia Ford, Lloyd Hutchinson, Philip McGinley, Katherine Pearce

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