Husbands & Sons at The Dorfman

The National’s Dorfman Theatre is very much a moveable feast.  Sometimes the action happens on stage, sometimes in the pit, but it is always innovative and never more so than with the latest offering, Husbands & Sons.  Director Marianne Elliott and Designer Bunny Christie have turned the acting space into three different Nottinghamshire households in order to bring to life Ben Power’s adaptation of three D.H. Lawrence plays, A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. The fact that this is a mining community is immediately apparent, as the coal pit is an ever-present force.  We hear it when the play starts and the steel bars surrounding the square pit area assault the senses as they creak upwards, brilliantly miming the noise of a mine shaft descending into the depths (a pit within the pit).  And we see it portrayed as a threatening glow beneath the actor’s feet. 

We, the audience are eavesdroppers on the grimness endured by the mining community Lawrence knew so well.  Each household has a family member who trudges to the pit each day, returning late, covered in black coal dust and fit only for a hot meal and cold beer or several.  The men may have to endure the horrors that their underground work has to offer, but their women folk have to withstand the consequences of the miner’s daily incarceration.

These three plays within a play concern three families, The Holroyds, The Gascoignes and The Lamberts.

Lizzie Holroyd (the always magnificent Anne-Marie Duff) shares her home with Charles (Martin Marquez) her drunken husband and their young son Jack.  Dreading the nightly ritual of Charles returning home, sodden with booze and occasionally accompanied by equally drunk trollops, she welcomes the odd visit from the local electrician.  He would “take her away from all this” at the drop of a hat, but Lizzie knows her duty.

Next door lives Minnie Gascoigne (Louise Brealey), Joe’s (Joe Armstrong) new wife.  A lady of means, with ideas above her station, according to her overbearing mother-in-law (the marvellous Susan Brown), Minnie’s main task is to wrestle her husband from his mother’s apron strings.

The matriarch of the third family is Lydia Lambert (Julia Ford) a woman who spends her life battling with her thuggish husband, Walter (Lloyd Hutchinson) and adoring her well educated son, Ernest (Johnny Gibbon).  Eaten up with jealousy over Ernest’s relationship with the equally clever, Maggie Pearson (Cassie Bradley), the main focus of her life is to save him from a life down the pit.

Although the grimness can be relentless and the Nottinghamshire accent initially difficult to understand, there is no disputing the fact that this ambitious production holds you in its grip.  And the styling is quite unique.  Although all the props are solid, the opening and closing of doors and windows are mimed, with the sound effects denoting their closure.  The food is invisible, but a real flame cooks it and each actor mimes the putting on and taking off of coats and jackets.  When the focus is on one household, the others remain static and the whole thing moves like a choreographed dance.  It cleverly highlights the drudgery of these strong willed pit wives.  Whilst their men go off every day to source coal, they stay at home to scrub off the residue of the wretched stuff, to no avail.  Housewives often bemoan the repetitiveness of a life spent keeping house but it’s nothing compared to that endured by these pragmatic women.

This truly is a wonderful ensemble piece with excellent performances throughout.  Not a bundle of laughs, tis true, but really worth seeing nevertheless.