The English Touring Theatre and Sheffield Theatres have gone on tour with their production of D. H. Lawrence’s famous (or infamous) Lady Chatterley’s Lover, adapted for the stage and directed by Phillip Breen. The story is well-known – Lady Chatterley is married to a man who has lost the use of his body from the waist down; she is sexually unsatisfied, and decides to take a lover, perhaps someone who can give her a baby who will be the heir to the Chatterley fortune. However, the lover she chooses, Mellors, the gamekeeper on the Chatterley estate, proves to be more than simply a sexual partner. In him, Constance Chatterley finds a man who can satisfy her physically, but who also challenges her preconceptions of the world.
A lot of sadness pervades the story – Clifford Chatterley encourages his wife to sleep with another man to produce an heir to his fortune, but seems devastated by the notion that Constance might fall in love with the father of her child; Constance and Mellors talk about their future together, but each conversation is tinged with the awareness that this can never be; Clifford’s nurse, Ivy Bolton, speaks often of the death of her husband in the pits years before, never able to move on emotionally from her marriage.
Underlying this play is the echo of war and the stir of revolution. Class struggle and misunderstanding is a major theme underpinning the novel, and the theatre company has brought this out very strongly in this production. Of course, there is the dichotomy between Mellors and the Chatterleys, but Sir Clifford’s disregard of the industrial strikes happening beneath his nose is interesting – the class system in England is changing, but he can’t see it. We, the audience, are showed glimpses of riots, strikes, and protests among the working classes, and this offers a really interesting backdrop to the main story.
Amidst all the furore of indecency and scandal which surround the history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the romantic element of this story is often ignored or forgotten. This play chooses to emphasise that this is a love story, and Hedydd Dylan and Jonah Russell as Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors have a very tender on-stage chemistry.
This production of Lady Chatterley’s Lover doesn’t break any new grounds in terms of stage-craft or great originality, but if you fancy an interesting retelling of a classic story, you’ll certainly enjoy this. ★★★☆☆ @BookingAround 19th October 2016
