Lawrence mash-up is a hit

Husbands and Sons, Royal Exchage, Manchester, to March 19

TYPICAL: you wait for years for one D H Lawrence play to come along then you get three at once, and all together.

This National Theatre/Royal Exchange production by former Exchange associate Marianne Elliott, has already been a hit at the National, and you can see why. Ben Power’s adaptation of three Lawrence plays, unproduced in his lifetime, is clever, mixes up Lawrence’s usual mothers and sons themes rather well, and has a terrific cast,

Anne Marie Duff of “Shameless” fame is present as the wife of a bullying drunkard (Martin Marquez), and Louise Brealey and Joe Armstrong turn the lovefest of the tour of the brilliant “Constellations” on its head by here playing warring newlyweds Luther and Minnie Gascoigne.

And let’s not forget Julia Ford as matriarch of the Lambert family. She pretty much started her acting career years ago at the Coliseum and here, older and with vastly more experience, adds a comforting weight to proceedings.

The stories Power combines are “A Collier’s Friday Night”, “The Daughter-in-Law” and “The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd”. All three are based in a mining street on the Derby-Notts border — prime Lawrence territory — and all three aren’t so much about mining as they are about relationships within tightly-regulated working class families in the early 20th century.

In “Collier”, domineering man of the house Walter (Lloyd Hutchinson) is struggling to get his wife (Ford) to pay more attention to him and less to their educated son, Ernest (Johnny Gibbon), on whom she dotes - shades of Lawrence’s famous novel “Sons and Lovers”

In “Daughter in Law” the extent to which a cuckoo in the nest — the mother-in-law (Susan Brown) — can disrupt a family is made all too obvious, and in the final play, there’s a cold war between Lizzie (Duff) and drunken hubby Charles, into which electrician Blackmore (Philip McGinley) squeezes.

The entire play is kept moving by terrific, natural performances from the main cast, and an entertaining story that is only just starting to lose its welcome after more than three hours.

I’m not sure doing the three plays mashed together with the stage area laid out in a sort of street flat-plan, the three families within cat-swinging distance of each other, is better than simply staging any one of them separately. But the evening is achieved with style and no little dramatic talent both on and off stage.