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Drama as sharp as broken glass
Richard Standing as Martin and Sara Poyzer as Janet. Picture: Nobby Clark Rutherford and Son Oxford Playhouse ***** Rutherford and
Son is a staggering
part-autobiographical play, long discarded but now magnificently
recovered from the theatrical discards by an impressive triad of
villains: Northern Broadsides company's founder and inspiration, the
actor-impresario Barry Rutter; the adapter, poet and critic Craig Raine;
and directing, the immortal Jonathan Miller. I'm rather more used to
Miller – famously, according to his
Beyond the Fringe credits, hauled in to
this world with an already fully grown beard - as an opera director:
mafiosi-filled Tabarro
or Rigoletto;
a spine-tingling Turn of the Screw
(with the magnificent young Samuel Burkey - whom Myfanwy Piper dubbed ‘a
real pro' - as Miles); or side-splitting
Mikados
with Richard Suart. Sir Jonathan Miller as purely theatrical stage
director is, I'm ashamed to say, pretty new to me. The reason for his own rapture at this play
(‘Isn't she marvellous,' an ebullient Miller, unlit fag in hand,
enthuses to my companion, both shivering outside at the interval) is
obvious: against the odds, it is the achievement of one woman, a Jane
Austen of her time, who even had to cloak her identity by using initials
on the billboards and programme. However on the eve of the Great War, on 31
January 1912, Githa Sowerby pulled off a stage triumph, scoring a hit
with public and critics at London's Royal Court Theatre, with the
premiere of her socially hard-hitting play Rutherford and Son. Central to the play (which can be seen at the New
Vic Theatre, Newcastle Under Lyme this coming week, 12-16 March) is an
industrial family from the North of England, not entirely unlike yet
hopefully not too like her own (one brother felt driven abroad to
America by circumstances he could not stomach), whose lives are all
corrupted and sacrificed by the slavish pursuit of mammon – and the
doomed pride of one self-made man, John Rutherford (‘Barrie Rutter was
born to play this role', proclaimed The Guardian). To compare the writing, or at least the structure
and content, with Ibsen is no exaggeration. Irish parallels suggest
themselves: O'Casey, if not Synge. As to the actual lines, some manage,
with their rebellious if not socialistic content, to sound like George
Bernard Shaw, a writer whose work Sowerby must have known well.
A Chekhov influence too, surmises Miller; well,
possibly. Might that be further-fetched? Miller, like Rutter, who
recently staged an adapted Three Sisters, knows his Chekhov well;
and Chekhov's plays were all done and dusted, Miller observes, eight
years earlier than Rutherford. Rutter, whom we are just as likely to see
cavorting round the stage sporting a giant phallus (The Trackers of
Oxyrhynchus, Lysistrata, shifted to the North East and recast
by Raine, Northern Broadsides' regular adapter, as Lisa's Sex Strike),
is quite marvellous as John Rutherford, the glass works owner, who
‘believes in the school of life' and accordingly treats his workers like
a sweat shop, growing increasingly odious as the play progresses (he's
pretty dire, cocksure and unforgiving from the start). ‘Being ‘appy makes nae porridge'; and he has a
point). This is a family soap, but one with immense power and acute
observation. The atmosphere is choking, the paterfamilias'
moral values vile. The firm, which means Rutherford's ego, comes before
anything else, including family. Stage by stage he alienates them all –
the pacing of these self-destructive encounters is one thing that makes
Sowerby's play so strong: two sons, John and Richard (Nicholas Shaw,
Andrew Grose), one of whom has already fled to the church (in
time-hallowed aristocracy's younger son mode?); a daughter, Janet (Sara
Poyzer); and a quiet but forceful daughter-in-law, Mary (Catherine
Kinsella), now five years married (father-in-law: ‘Everyone knows that
nothing good comes out of a marriage like yours'), who will turn out to
be Rutter's blackmailing moral nemesis at the play's brilliantly set up
dénouement. That, at least, comes out of it. It's not all plain sailing. To make the case for
the play, it's important the dramatic impulse never flags, and it does
once or twice. There are passages that Miller surely rightly sees as a
kind of Adagio. One works, another earlier on doesn't. The play is not
without what today, maybe with unfair hindsight, we might call cliché. The role of Rutherford's sister, black-clad
(widowed?) Ann - Kate Anthony - is rather thinly defined by playwright
and director. Janet, the daughter, tends rather to repeat herself,
sometimes labouring key points. The set (Isabella Bywater) is not
especially evocative or specific, and Guy Hoare's lighting – normally
superb – is limited by the dependence Rutter makes on rather
underpowered, gloomy candlelight. The point is obvious; but it's milked
to the disadvantage of cast and audience. But these are cavils at what was, if only because
of its originality, a repertoire triumph. As a manager, Rutter is
marvellous at digging out and giving daring new life to neglected, or
reinventing place-specific, material, often using Morrison's adapting
skills – Kleist, Sophocles, Euripides - enhancing and restoring, rather
than ratting on the original. Morrison has tampered little, the location
being already Geordie (or here, from the allusions, North Yorkshire):
the play is allowed to speak for itself. There's a quiet,
unsensationalising honesty about the production. That's because Miller, huge intellect and all,
has grasped that the unfamiliar needs a chance to speak directly. You
have to give ‘new' work the chance to blossom without getting in its
way. It's something some opera directors, especially German ones, could
do with learning from. Miller may sex up Traviata or Rigoletto
(Rosenkavalier and G&S don't need it); but here the script,
perhaps inevitably prosaic with bursts of poetry, gets through. Sowerby
emerges, and we are the better for it. Performances came and went. One of the most dramatic moments – in a way the set-piece of part one, just as the finale is that of part two - is the appearance of Mrs. Henderson (Wendi Peters), a working-class mother with the most glorious of the oop North accents, whose son has been sacked for fairly good reasons, who begs for mercy and gets none. Barrie Rutter as John Rutherford and Sara Poyzer as Janet This is one of the O'Casey-like moments, and like
him, Sowerby brings shades of Greek Tragedy to bear. Outwardly she's a blunt, battering Margaret of
Anjou figure (Richard III). She calls a spade a spade, and we
might think her an avenging angel, a foretaste of Rutherford's ultimate
discomfiting and downfall: for Rutherford is indeed virtually an Arthur
Miller character – think of complacent Joe Keller in All My Sons. She and the smug, unflinching, ghastly Rutter
(one of the few other actors today who could do the role so convincingly
is Kenneth Cranham) do battle, a full-blooded screaming match, and
though he doesn't know it, he emerges more scarred than she does. The
writing is on the wall.
There's not much time in this play for the
justifiability of Rutherford's attitude, but Sowerby does scatter it
around his utterances. While there's the obligatory ‘I didn't get where
I got's (too Reggie Perrin) and ‘To think I devoted so much time
and money to bringing you up…'; and he seems more interested in ‘the
road to the Tarn', ‘Up Dales' or ‘the fell race at Grassington' than
keeping his own family together (he is, in a sense, unlike them, a
child; and how badly we need a Mrs. Rutherford, doubtless equally
cowed), he also argues (as nouveaux riches do) for ancestral
values, economic drive and necessity – the 1880s to 1910s are a
time of not just economic boom, but its importance (including glass) to
a national, even imperial, resurgence. But you can imagine Rutter's Rutherford (curious
coincidence of names) engaging with the war effort – arms manufacture or
shell filling – with equally revolting self-justification. It's just
that if his 18th Century/Industrial Revolution paternalist
attitude were universal, there could well have been a Marxist
revolution, as there were in Russia, Germany and Hungary, just as George
V feared. Of the rest of the cast, it's the other working
class figure who scores: Richard Standing's Martin, a belated candidate
for Janet's hand (here again, though not fully explored, the social bite
of the play) - an offer Rutherford, jumped-up himself, sweepingly
dismisses. Martin is, Miller J. is right, a fledgling Chekhovian figure. There's no actual suicide in this play, but it's
amazing Rutherford doesn't trigger some – his own, for instance. But the
play does break-ups without histrionic frills. Like an edifice, it all
just collapses before your eyes. Why the design plan didn't pick up on
this imagery – just a glimpse of a Lowry-like factory would help – I
can't think.
One possible reason – hence the candles too – is
that Rutter and the director want to create a feel of utter
claustrophobia. The grim darkness enveloping the room serves as metaphor
for moral odour, perhaps even the swirl of choking smoke that even glass
factories, new inventions or no (son John is an embryonic scientist who
has patented a new device his father disgustingly – or legitimately? -
wants to prise from him for his own factory) belch around whole cities.
Whether we're in Middlesbrough or Leeds or Bradford, it's an air no one
can breathe. Sara Poyzer's 36-year-old Janet strengthened the
first half: a sort of Dorothy Tutin/Varya figure (again, Chekhov: The
Cherry Orchard premiered in 1904, the year of his death), bustling
round her supine father, dutiful but dull, almost but not quite (‘Where
am I to go?') ready to break out in her own way (‘I'm your father: I
have a right to be obeyed… .I raised you up a class, and I've a right to
expect you to stay there'). Latterly she fades. How much of Sowerby, or
Githa's sisters, is in her? In another life, and with more courage,
Janet could so easily have been a suffragette. The sons' performances were sound, if a bit
cipher-like - though that's the point, such is the monster's sway.
Richard, offered a ‘senior' curacy at St. Jude's Southport, has quite a
nice surly but then conceding interchange with his father. John has a
rather striking conversation with his wife – more or less a monologue
for him: yet another instance of how masterful Sowerby is at giving all
the characters interacting scenes that tease out some new detail. Thanks to the money, John was despatched to
Harrow: it doesn't show, except when the children warn their father,
maybe not accurately, ‘Rutherford's has come to an end'. ‘Go to bed,
both of you. There's man's work to be done. You're best out of the way.'
What a bastard. The climax – where the one non-acting member of
the cast turns out to be the key to it all – is electrifying. Kinsella
(a triumph as Rosaline in Northern Broadsides' recent Love's Labour's
Lost) emerges as the one member of the plot, Rutter and Peters
aside, to have real guts, and to display it. Mary's performance at the
end is, for me, the best dramatic outpouring, of the whole play; far
more ominous because it is so measured. It's perhaps a rather obvious thing to say that
these involving performances could yet develop and deepen. There was a
very slight dress rehearsal feel about this Oxford Playhouse
performance. But the case for Rutherford and Son, it is now made.
Miller and Rutter are right, that it deserves to take its place amongst
the greats of U.K., or indeed all turn-of-the-century, or even 20th
century European, theatre. Sowerby died in 1970 aged 93, almost entirely
forgotten. There are other plays: might another be good? Anyway, you
only have to look at the undated family photo around 1890 in the
programme, to guarantee you won't forget her. Aged about 12 or 13, she
looks fabulous. She could be my muse any day.
Touring till Saturday 1 June. At the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle Under Lyme from Tuesday 12 to Saturday 16 March, www.newvictheatre.org.uk
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