We tend to think of DH Lawrence as a novelist first, a poet second and a playwright scarcely at all. Yet, as this overlooked 1912 work indicates, Lawrence was not a bad dramatist. The Daughter-in-Law is a corrosive study of a collapsing working-class marriage. Luther, a miner, is a sullen, uncommunicative drunk dominated by his mother; Minnie, his bride, has a bit of money put aside and is therefore perceived as a little hoity-toity.
Looking back, Lawrence was the first working-class realist, predating John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney by almost half a century. Even his theatrical antithesis, George Bernard Shaw, could see that he had something. "I wish I could write such dialogue," he commented. "With mine, I always hear the sound of the typewriter." In fact it's written in a Midlands dialect so thick that Joanna Read's fine revival takes some tuning into. Luther's ma is accused of "marding her son up to be as soft as mard", which makes it clear that the piece is a dry run for themes more fully developed in Sons and Lovers.
Though Luther can appear a callow brute, Michael Shelford shows a buried sensitivity shining through a mask of coal dust. And Nia Gwynne's Minnie is magnificent in her stoic attempt to salvage her marriage. Some of her comments, such as the fact that she would prefer to be knocked about by her husband than ignored, are difficult to palate today. But she is the first heroine to suffer the classic Lawrentian conundrum: "How is a woman to have a husband when all the men belong to their mothers?"
