6/25/2023 0 Comments Husbands and Sons by D.H. Lawrence![]() ![]() The plays’ families – the Lamberts, the Holroyds, and the Gascoignes – are all variants of Lawrence’s own the wives are all more thoughtful, refined and ambitious than their men the couples are all unhappy the mothers all jealously guard their sons from their lovers, and run into conflict with their actual or potential daughters-in-law. He argues that the three plays’ pieces slot into each other and he’s right. But, it was presumably felt, these days a full Lawrence series would be just a bit too much. The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd was well-revived by the Orange Tree Theatre in the autumn of 2014, and RADA did a decent The Daughter-in-Law that February. 1968 was the giddy height of both the Lawrence craze and of kitchen-sink realism, which Lawrence had anticipated by half a century of course those productions were a success. ![]() Ben Power did the mashing up, feeling ‘the danger for an audience, if staged as a trilogy, of how potentially repetitive they could be.’ That – and Peter Gill did wildly successful productions of these three plus The Fight for Barbara (1913) in 1968 and, it would seem, he didn’t want to compete with those, one of which was a world premiere. Lawrence it is a mash-up (hear that word in an Eastwood accent) of three of them: A Collier’s Friday Night (1909), The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1909-10) and The Daughter-in-Law (1913). National Theatre: Dorfman, 21 st October 2015 – 10 th February 2016 ![]() Philip McGinley as Blackmore and Anne-Marie Duff as Lizzie Holroyd ![]()
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