The intersection of class and sex has long fascinated dramatists: you only have to think of August Strindberg, DH Lawrence and John Osborne. Peter Gill’s beautiful play, first seen in 2001, owes a lot to that tradition, but Robert Hastie’s revival, shared between the Donmar and Sheffield Crucible, reminds us that it adds a layer of understated poetry.
The situation is relatively simple. George, a farm labourer living in a tied cottage with his mother, gets involved with John, who has come up from London in the 1960s to work as assistant director on a revival of the York Mysteries. What is moving is the way their affair is tacitly accepted by George’s family. But this is also a play about the way art has, over the centuries, become the property of the middle classes. One of the reasons George is hesitant about appearing in the Mysteries, initially performed by medieval guild members, is that the cast is made up of “doctors and that”. One of the play’s best scenes shows George’s family returning from a performance and nervously expressing their enthusiasm. As George’s mum says, “It was very Yorkshire, wasn’t it? Not that I mind.”
Among the many gulfs in the play, as Hastie’s production subtly reminds us, is that between town and country. The eyes of Jonathan Bailey’s John shine with naive excitement as he takes in the world of cowsheds and kitchen ranges, yet you know that, emotionally and professionally, he is irrevocably metropolitan. Ben Batt’s George is similarly rooted in rural Yorkshire, and when he cries, resisting a move to London, “I live here”, he makes it sound like a declaration of religious faith.
Both actors are excellent and, even if Lesley Nicol as George’s mum seems a bit stagey, there is a lovely performance from Katie West as a local girl devoted to George, even though she is well aware of his sexual preference. At one point she quotes a line from the Bible – “There is no remembrance of former things”, but Gill disproves that by unforgettably showing how, in England, class both was, and probably always will be, a dividing factor.
• At Donmar Warehouse, London, until 24 March. Box office: 020-3282 3808. At Sheffield Crucible from 27 March to 7 April. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
