Bertie Carvel, in his impressive directorial debut, offers an arresting start to John Galsworthy’s 1909 play Strife. As we hear an audio potted history of Britain’s industrial disputes, starting backwards from Tata Steel’s decision to sell off its UK operations, we watch, in Robert Jones’s design, a glowing furnace-fresh bar levered across the stage and transformed into a company directors’ Edwardian tabletop.
Instantly, Carvel suggests our troubled present has its roots in the distant past.
Galsworthy’s play is a study in mutual intransigence. On the one side you have John Anthony: the obdurate chairman of a Welsh tinplate firm who, against the advice of his fellow directors, refuses to yield an inch to the company’s striking workers. On the other side you have David Roberts: a firebrand socialist who, ignoring the pleas of the workers’ starving wives and a cautious union official, is determined to see the dispute through to the bitter end. The flaw in Galsworthy’s structure is that he assumes a moral equivalence between the two men. From today’s standpoint, Anthony appears a patriarchal reactionary, whereas there is an iron logic to Roberts’ argument that, having gone so far, the workers are on the brink of achieving their goals.
It is invigorating, however, to see a play that tackles labour disputes head on. The best scene features an open-air meeting in which the militant Roberts, the moderate union man, a Welsh Bible-puncher and a turncoat worker all express different points of view.
Galsworthy’s play also offers two big leading roles. William Gaunt endows Anthony with a leonine grandeur at odds with the character’s physical frailty. Ian Hughes as Roberts, meanwhile, is all bright-eyed fervour in his rage against the iniquities of capital. Even if the other roles are less substantial, Mark Quartley as Anthony’s idealistic son, Lizzy Watts as his do-gooding daughter and Lucy Black as Roberts’s sickly wife all put flesh on the bare bones. Galsworthy may have been a reformist rather than a revolutionary, but who today writes so vividly about our industrial troubles?
•At Minerva, Chichester, until 10 September. Box office: 01243 781312.
