Daughter in Law

At first sight this seems a strange play for the Young Vic to choose. Ever since the Monty Python send-up of the Hampstead intellectual wanting to be a miner, there’s been a touch of condescension about the works of the earthy, industrial writers of whom Lawrence is a prime example.

The Daughter-in-Law is about a woman, Minnie, who marries Luther Gascoyne, a miner. Six weeks into the marriage, Luther is shocked to hear that his previous lover is pregnant by him. But that’s just the starting point for an exploration of some great themes: the debilitating effect of money, the power struggles within a marriage and most of all about a man’s relationship with his mother (that favourite Lawrentian theme). It’s to Lawrence’s credit that the action of the play revolves around the relationships between the individuals and doesn’t lapse into melodrama as he could so easily have done.

What comes across in David Lan’s clear and uncluttered production is how fresh and relevant much of the play is. The strikers’ incomprehension that there’s no money to settle the dispute while the senior management move into new houses seems just as valid now as it was then.

And as marital counsellors always tell us, the biggest cause of arguments within marriage is money. And it is the power of money that dominates the play. Mrs Gascoyne will not provide money to Luther to give to the mother of his unborn child, Minnie, brought up in service in a big house, is well aware of the power of money, and a gulf grows between Luther and Minnie over the savings that she’s salted away.

This is no neglected masterpiece though. There are several unexplained events that a playwright of greater stagecraft could have avoided (where does Minnie get her money from? Why does everyone turn up at Luther and Minnie’s house at the start of the second half of the evening?) and the characters are all too ready to speak in clichés and homilies. Yet, the lack of original language is also one of the strengths; Lawrence was writing about real people with real problems –not ciphers for a playwright’s own philosophy.

This could so easily have collapsed into parody. It didn’t because a hard-working cast brought Lawrence’s words to life. Paul Hilton’s Luther is an incoherent, uncomprehending oaf completely in awe of Marjorie Yates’s bitter and fierce matriarch, loyally protective of Luther (“ a son’s a son till he teks a wife,” she says, not believing a word of it). But the stand-out performance is Anne-Marie Duff’s Minnie. She perfectly captures Minnie’s simultaneous desires to make a success of her marriage, to better her lot in life, and to destroy the influence that Luther’s mother has over him. We see how Minnie, in time, will grow to be the matriarch in her own right, and how the sorry process will begin all over again.

- Maxwell Cooter