Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those writers' examinations of emotional claustrophobia and thwarted ambition.
How much of this is in the original, edited and translated by Blake Morrison and directed by neuropsychologist Jonathan Miller I confess I don't know, but if this is wholly her work then she was remarkably prescient; obsession with class and worker-owner strife, as well as a horribly dysfunctional family, are here. It could almost be 1970s agitprop with added Freud.
But then Morrison and Blake had many archetypes to work with, not least the cruel patriarch Rutherford (Barrie Rutter), a Yorkshire industrialist much concerned with his position in society and a bully whose children despise him; his milksop heir, John (Nicholas Shaw), who ran off to London and “married beneath him”, and effete second son Dick (Andrew Grose), a man of the cloth whom Rutherford dismisses with: “There are more ways than one of shirking life, and religion's one of them.”
Rutherford's daughter, Janet (Sara Poyzer), cruelly taunted for her spinster state, barely contains her contempt for him and, Nora-like, talks of being freed from a cage when he throws her out for having a secret affair with his loyal and hardworking factory manager Martin (Richard Standing), who we realise is the son Rutherford never had. John's wife Mary (Catherine Kinsella) is treated as stranger, while Rutherford's sister Ann (Kate Anthony getting every ounce of comedy from her role), meanwhile, is content with her lot and can't see why either woman should have cause to complain. “I'm pig-sick of having to find fault all the time,” she says in broad Yorkshire vowels.
Rutherford controls everyone in his grand house and has dynastic ambitions for the family firm. But when John tries to negotiate with his father over his invention - which he hopes will make him independently rich but which old man Rutherford wants to make the company successful once more - the family fractures. In the fallout, Martin is caught between doing right by one man, which means wrong by another.
Rutter puts the mega into megalomaniac in a performance that's sometimes one-note (and a loud one at that), all barking orders, sarcastic remarks and banging tables in the first act, but which has more subtle cadences in the second, when Rutherford realises he is alone as his children flee from his grasp and that he has been outmanoeuvred by Mary. Like him, she's intent on securing her son's future, but for a very different reason. There are superb performances from the women as Janet realises that her freedom comes with a price and Mary that she has married a fool, while Gilly Tompkins almost steals the show as the wheedling dipsomaniac Mrs Henderson, one of Dick's parishioners.
This production, which started life at Northern Broadsides' home in Halifax and has been touring the UK, is lit by Guy Hoare, who expresses both industrial and domestic gloom expertly.
