Once ahead of its time, now a bit of a cliche

The Daughter in Law
Library Company at the Lowry, to March 10
D H Lawrence is perhaps mainly, and unfairly, remembered merely as the first mainstream British smut-monger.

Think of him instead as well ahead of his time, and a terrific writer of female characters — though whether this was because he was very much a mother’s boy or because he understood women well is hard to say. His male characters, on the other hand, are often rather ineffectual.

So it proves with this mining-community play, one of a handful unseen in his lifetime.

Such news can often be read as “these plays were poor”; but can, as in this case, mean they were ahead of their time and any producer’s nerve.

In 1913, a drama about a newly-married miner fathering another woman’s child, paying her off, deceiving the new wife and only partially condemning an interfering mother keen to drive a wedge between the couple, might well have seemed jolly racy.

Trouble is, this groundbreaking work is now weighed down by every working-class drama and comedy that followed it: we come to it not seeing its dramatic intensity, but its working-class cliches.

This production occasionally looks more like Brighouse or Houghton than the Strindberg or Chekhov to which the text has been compared.

Which is the only explanation I can offer for the way Chris Honer’s production seems so superficial and light. Lawrence might not have been as po-faced as he is often portrayed, but opening night got laughs where there shouldn’t have been any.

The odd remark, amusing in its no-nonsense rudeness, from the family matriarch (Diane Fletcher) and her fellow sufferer Mrs Purdy (Susan Twist) I can understand; even the boyish answering back of younger-son Joe (Paul Simpson). But too often the central, tortured relationship between the Tom Hardy-like Alun Raglan as Luther and Natalie Grady as Minnie brought laughter from the audience — mainly because of Raglan’s performance in a badly-drawn character, which rarely matched Grady’s in depth.

These are not comic characters but people in emotional upheaval: she, betrayed but trying to hang on to her man; he consumed by the fear that it’s only a matter of time before she leaves him.

Hardly anything these two say to each other is cause for laughs, yet we are consistently led to believe they are another of Harold Brighouse’s comedy couples.