STRIFE
Minerva Studio, Chichester
Opened 18 August, 2016
****

Former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and his wife were in the opening-night audience... appropriately, perhaps, given the party’s current ructions and a play about a labour dispute in which both sides are dominated by prideful figures determined not to concede an inch to each other. In John Galsworthy’s 1909 play, however, the conflict takes the form of a strike by impoverished Welsh steelworkers treated with contempt by their London-based board of directors.

Our social codes today may be radically different, but the economic and ideological arguments have once again become familiar. Bertie Carvel, that protean actor here making his directorial debut, emphasises this with a tape-montage prologue of news clips working backwards through nationalisation to that first era of private companies, after beginning literally at the present day, with Today programme anchor John Humphrys announcing the actual date.

The two central figures are almost polar opposites. As David Roberts, the strikers’ leader, Ian Hughes is eloquent and impassioned, invoking both class struggle against “the white-faced, stony-hearted monster” Capital and his comrades’ oaths of personal loyalty, and almost but not quite disguising his motive of revenge against the company for exploiting a discovery of his own. And in the blue corner, venerable actor William Gaunt as chairman of the board John Anthony, glowering from his wheelchair, scarcely even uttering two sentences together until a final-act cataract of intransigence making explicit his atavistic philosophy of brute strength and winning the fight. At various points between the two are Roberts’ wife, an emblem of all the starving, freezing families of the strikers, and Anthony’s daughter, who considers herself sympathetic but is a prisoner of her hierarchical class attitudes.

Politically, Galsworthy’s sympathies lie with the long-suffering union representative attempting to get the strikers to pull in their horns and offer a viable basis for negotiation; emotionally, they are with Anthony’s son, whose acceptance of his moral responsibility for the community’s suffering begins the boardroom revolt against his father. Mark Quartley is excellent in this role, biting back his bitter self-recrimination also until the final act. Carvel’s direction does not always show the lightest touch, but is consistently intelligent in arguing that this play still has lessons for us today.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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