Library, Manchester
It's remarkable that, until relatively recently, DH Lawrence's paintings were probably more esteemed than his plays. Lawrence never saw his depiction of marital warfare between a pit worker and his wife produced in his lifetime; but The Daughter-in-Law now enters its 100th year acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century English drama.
There was nothing dilettantish about Lawrence's flirtation with the stage: his only sin was to invent kitchen-sink drama 50 years before it became commercially viable. But even George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for the flinty naturalism of the dialogue: "With mine, I always hear the sound of the typewriter." That's slightly ironic, perhaps, given that the percussive racket and tacket of east Midlands idioms can sound like a giant key being struck.
Lawrence's play presents the cynical interplay of a failing couple who delight in pressing one another's buttons. Luther accuses his wife, Minnie, a former governess, of bearing the taint of the middle classes; she, voicing what was to become a perennial Lawrentian theme, blames his mother for "marding you up till you were all mard soft". An enjoyable aspect of Chris Honer's fine production is the humour gained from Lawrence's depiction of Manchester as the immoral seat of Mammon from where Minnie acquired her hoity-toity ideas. There's a note of deviant triumph in which Natalie Grady's Minnie declares that she has dealt with the troublesome inequality of her modest savings: "I was sick of having it between us. So I went to Manchester and spent it."
Alun Raglan deftly shows how Luther's dialect thickens as his emotions intensify. At times it becomes so alien as to be practically a foreign tongue. But it captures the essence of Lawrence's domestic tragedy: a young couple tethered by social convention, yet barely able to speak the same language.