Lyn Gardner 

Lady Chatterley’s Lover review – passionate play loses Lawrence’s politics

Phillip Breen’s adaptation sensitively and sweetly explores Mellors and Constance’s love affair but takes the focus away from the social backdrop
  
  

Try a little tenderness … Jonah Russell (Mellors) and Hedydd Dylan (Constance) in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Try a little tenderness … Jonah Russell (Mellors) and Hedydd Dylan (Constance) in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Photograph: Mark Douet

DH Lawrence’s working title for his infamous 1928 novel was Tenderness. Adapter and director Phillip Breen finds plenty of that in the story of Constance who finds solace in the arms of Oliver Mellors, the estate gamekeeper, after her husband returns home injured and impotent from the first world war.

Cleverly, Breen keeps the titters at bay. The first glimpse of nudity is not during sex, but in a doctor’s examination room where Constance (Hedydd Dylan) stands thin and pale as paper. When she and Mellors (Jonah Russell) do remove their clothes, they are as awkward and shy as teenagers. It is sweet and silly, not sexy. After they first couple – a swift, animal-like encounter – Mellors decorously moves her skirt back in place across her thigh as if protecting her ladyship’s modesty.

In one of the best scenes the lovers run around the forest naked in the rain, their bodies vulnerable to the bullet-like drops of water that fall from the sky. Andrea J Cox’s sound design constantly invokes the twitter of birds conjuring not just this wood in England but Flanders, too.

In the novel’s first paragraph, Lawrence writes: “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.” Constance speaks those words towards the end of the show, but the sentiment hovers over the whole production which, in its stunning opening moments, sees life resume in the great house as the furniture is released from dust clothes that look like shrouds. The war is a pall that hangs over everything.

In Laura Hopkins’ clever and simple design, armfuls of flowers are used to suggest a wood in spring, the flowering of love and also a graveyard. The ancient wood is where all the hopes of Constance’s husband, Clifford (Eugene O’Hare), are buried. He’s an unsympathetic man, his impotence symptomatic of a class that fails to realise that the world has changed for ever and that men do not need masters. Nevertheless, the evening’s most moving moment belongs not to the lovers but to him. With an appalling struggle, he manages to briefly stand upright when he talks to Constance after she has returned from Venice, where he believes she has gone to conceive the child they cannot have together.

The production is beady-eyed about class, but so fillets the original that the focus becomes far narrower, moving away from the mining dispute in the novel and robbing the evening of a sense of a society on the brink of change and seething with ideas around socialism.

Breen the director often copes admirably and initially makes some capital out of the succession of short scenes offered by Breen the writer, but as the evening extends towards three hours, it never finds a fluidity and becomes as stop-start as Sir Clifford’s motorised bath chair. There is a danger, too, that the pervasive, desultory postwar malaise translates into an overall flatness of tone that is underwhelming. It is as if the sky hasn’t fallen but merely tilted a little.

• At the Crucible, Sheffield, until 15 October. Box office: 0114-249 6000. Then touring.

 

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