It can be engaging, even flattering, for
audience members to be welcomed as they enter the Viaduct Theatre in
Halifax, the home of the Northern Broadsides company, by artistic
director Barrie Rutter, but for a reviewer it may be rather daunting,
especially with the knowledge that Rutter is about to play a tyrant
such as the
paterfamilias at
the centre of Githa Sowerby’s 1912 play. John Rutherford senior has
made the family’s Yorkshire metalworks what it is, but what it is is
financially beleaguered unless he can obtain his son young John’s
“recipe” for making white metal more cheaply. Rutherford may be
concerned only for the posterity of the business and of his family, but
he acts with no less arrogant solipsism than if he had been motivated
by the most lustful greed. In pursuit of his own vision he drives away
all three of his children: young John by his theft of the formula,
Janet for daring to strike up a relationship with the works foreman
(from whom Rutherford winkles the formula before firing him too), and
young clergyman Dick more or less simply for having the effrontery to
think of others. He is left the ruler of a barren kingdom but for the
deal proposed in the closing minutes by young John’s wife Mary, whom he
in turn has abandoned along with their infant son.
Sowerby’s drama was considered a slice of Northern realism a century
ago, but watching it today in Blake Morrison’s edition, I was struck by
its melodrama, which is further accentuated by Jonathan Miller’s
production. Miller allows the grim and the sombre their natural head as
a kind of baseline, but when emotions run higher he seems to treat the
play more like one of the operas which have for some time eclipsed
theatre in his career as a director. When Sara Poyzer’s Janet confronts
her father just before the interval and her beloved Martin after it,
the actors – none of whom is lacking in either ability or commitment –
seem to be performing overwrought duets, with voices high and
penetrating and gestures grandiose. It is one more factor placing the
action in a world that is now barely a memory, together with the
furnaces which glowed in the night and the northern character of pride
and self-reliance of which Rutherford (and, indeed, son) is such a
perversion.
Written for the Financial
Times.