DH Lawrence was highly dismissive of Strindberg in his Letters. That seems odd when you consider that his autobiographical 1912 play, The Fight for Barbara, which kicks off the Peter Hall Company's season at Bath, is a kind of Anglicised Miss Julie: as an absconding English couple quarrel in a rented Italian villa the class and sex wars merrily combine.
"Much of it is word-for-word true," Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett; and that is both the play's strength and weakness. Jimmy Wesson, the collier's son, and his aristocratic married lover, Barbara Tressider, are clearly based on Lawrence himself and Frieda Weekley.
Their rows and recriminations, as well as Barbara's guilt over her desertion of her distraught husband, closely mirror reality; and when the husband himself turns up, along with Barbara's parents, the stage is set for an epic domestic battle.
The problem is that this is history seen from the victor's viewpoint. Lawrence paints Jimmy as a staunch, loving, dependable workhorse who lights the fires and cooks all the meals: Barbara, meanwhile is wilful, capricious, mocking and half-drawn to her clamorous husband. Oddly enough Lawrence writes best when he abandons self-exculpation and identifies with Tressider in his pleas to Barbara to return home.
Although the play has none of the socio-political force of The Daughter-in-Law which shortly followed it, it remains a highly revivable curiosity; and Thea Sharrock's cleancut production does it full emotional justice.
I feel she might have reined in Rebecca Hall who, in the early scenes, overdoes Barbara's merciless vivacity; but once she calms down Hall touchingly brings out the character's unworldly vulnerability. Jason Hughes has a much easier task as the strong, silent hero which is Lawrence's flattering self-portrait.
And there is an outstanding performance from William Chubb as Tressider which combines cuckolded pathos with simmering rage. Both men, at different points, say they want to strangle Barbara; and it's a measure both of the play's emotional candour and of Lawrence's attempt at self-justification that we know exactly how they feel.
· In rep until August 9. Box office: 01225 448844.
