To make an audience feel it is watching not just one uncurling episode, but an entire way of life: this surely is what directors and playwrights often wish for. It is what adapter Ben Power and director Marianne Elliott have pulled off in Husbands & Sons. They call their production a “collage”. Coalage is more like it.
Power has spliced together three plays by DH Lawrence: A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Each is set in the household of a mining town that resembles the Eastwood of Lawrence’s Nottinghamshire childhood. Each was written just before the first world war. Each is galvanised by a struggle for vitality. Sons are smothered by mothers, wives fight with their mothers-in-law for their men, husbands and wives pitch into each other (“you sliving bitch”). The Pit provides a living and threatens extinction.
Bunny Christie’s ingenious design – part flat-plan, part detailed re-creation – seats the audience around three lamplit interiors, identically laid out and equipped with range, coal bucket, kettle and table. Lucy Carter’s lighting traps sorrowful women in bowls of light. Tal Rosner’s video sends giant raindrops racing on the ground between them. A metal frame encloses the action, rising and falling at the beginning and end. It clangs as if machinery were being winched to the top of a pit. And as if Judgment Day were at hand.
Elliott’s production is both extremely specific and flowingly non-naturalistic. That is its force. The dialogue is clenched but ardent, strewn with worritings and bletherings and chelpings (you get the point without having to look them up). The movement is partly mimed. When excellent Susan Brown pulls on an invisible hat, she demonstrates her adamantine matriarchy with every brusque twitch of her fingers. As an unhappy wife-turned-widow, Anne-Marie Duff is so ferocious and delicate that she seems to be burning up her body: you seem to see the blood racing beneath her skin.
Lawrence’s “religion” can read like an alarming rant on the page: “a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect”. On stage this becomes palpable, less dotty and more interesting. You see the flesh and blood incarnated, and his fervour released from his philosophising.
• Husbands & Sons is at the Dorfman, London SE1 until 10 February
