One of the Arts Council’s more ludicrous recent decisions was to strip this indispensable theatre of its annual grant. But Paul Miller, as its new director, gets off to a fine start with a cracking revival of a DH Lawrence play that was written in 1910 but hardly seen until a famous Peter Gill season at the Royal Court in 1968.
The play stands up today as that rare thing in English drama: an authentic working-class tragedy. What is striking is Lawrence’s ability to show how a domestic crisis emerges from a background of Zolaesque realism: clothes have to be washed, meals prepared and tables laid even as the Holroyds’ marriage hits the rocks. Charlie Holroyd is a hard-drinking miner who antagonises his socially superior wife, not least by bringing home a couple of women he’s picked up in the pub; Mrs Holroyd, for her part, is tempted to escape into the arms of a devoted young electrician, Blackmore. But one of Lawrence’s many gifts as a dramatist is his ability to endow his characters with an emotional intelligence that makes them painfully aware of their plight: Holroyd is not simply a brute but a man scorched by the knowledge he has lost his wife’s love, while Mrs Holroyd and Blackmore, even though their passion is never consummated, remain riddled with guilt.
All this comes across strongly in Miller’s production, where the intimate setting intensifies our sense of involvement. Ellie Piercy is excellent as Mrs Holroyd: her body is weighed down by domestic toil but her face is an expressive guide to her conflicting emotions, and she is sharp enough to observe, when Blackmore lovingly tends her wounded husband, “You only do it to play on my feelings.” There is good support from Gyuri Sarossy, who turns Holroyd himself into a damaged bull; from Polly Hemingway as a mother hardened to suffering from a lifetime of pit disasters; and from Jordan Mifsud as the ardent Blackmore. Even if the final corpse-washing was amusingly parodied by Alan Bennett in Enjoy, this is a play that catches you by the throat and makes you wish Lawrence’s palpable dramatic gifts had been encouraged in his own lifetime.
• Until 4 October. Box office: 020-8940 3633. Venue: Orange Tree, Richmond.
