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.