Watching Sam Walters's masterly revival of Lawrence's sixth (and arguably best) play, one can only wonder at the bovine laziness of a British theatre that neglects its own native, working-class drama.
Two ingredients make for strong theatre: a protagonist driven to desperation and a seamless interweaving of private and public worlds. Both are on view in Lawrence's play, where the newly-married Minnie discovers that her miner husband Luther has got another woman pregnant.
The tension stems from Minnie's attempt to reclaim him: not so much from the pregnant Bertha, to whose family he has to pay £40 in compensation, but from his own mother, to whose apron-strings he remains firmly tied. "How is a woman to have a husband?" Minnie asks in a classic Lawrentian line, "if all the men belong to their mothers?"
Sex, class and economics all effortlessly combine in Lawrence's masterpiece. In a play full of great scenes, possibly the finest is that in which Luther admits to Minnie that he has fathered a bastard child: Luther's guilt takes the form of an unreasoning anger while Minnie taunts him with being mollycoddled, "marded" and sexually inadequate. Strindberg never did anything finer in the exploration of marital tension. But Lawrence also subtly reminds us that Luther's hatred is heightened by his sense of economic dependence: not only is he aware that his wife could easily cancel his sexual debt but that, with a miners' strike looming, he will be unable to provide for her.
Freud and Marx combine in this great English play. On one level, Lawrence is writing about men's oedipal attachment to their mothers. But the play is also about the economic injustice of a system where miners' pay was dependent on local price lists while the pit manager got a fixed £1,200 a year. Lawrence doesn't just use money to spice up the play's background: he makes it integral to the human relationships.
All this comes out clearly in a finely-cast production where character is revealed through action. Octavia Walters as Minnie has just the right refined determination in her battle with Rowena Cooper's tight-lipped, ball-breaking Mrs Gascoigne. Alan Cox's Luther perfectly blends virility and weakness, Steven Elder is a hauntingly dreamy Joe and there is a peach of a performance from Jeanne Hepple who, as the "werriting" mother of the pregnant Bertha, might have stepped straight out of the pages of Dickens. A great evening.
Until March 24. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
