My son is my son till he takes him a wife, goes the old saying, but my daughter’s my daughter the whole of her life. In The Daughter-in-Law, an early D.H. Lawrence play that wasn’t produced until 1967—more than half a century after a young Lawrence wrote it—this aphorism is uttered more than once, by a woman who has apparently not made peace with its implications.
The play, now being revived for the second time by director Martin Platt for Mint Theater Company—which dedicates itself to unearthing and staging “lost or forgotten” works—is set in Lawrence’s native Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, during the Great Labour Unrest that unfolded in the U.K. between 1911 and 1914. Eastwood was then a coal-mining town, and as the play opens, the miners are poised to strike—a development that might preoccupy resident Mrs. Gascoyne, as two of her grown sons, Luther and Joe, share that occupation. But Mrs. Gascoyne has other, even more personal concerns to contend with: Luther, who after three decades has finally left the nest to get married (Joe still lives with his mum) is apparently about to become a father, and his new wife is not the one expecting.
Complicating matters further are Mrs. Gascoyne’s obvious misgivings about Luther’s bride, Minnie, who grew up in the same town but has had different experiences, and harbors different expectations. A former governess with some money of her own, Minnie courted Luther when they were in their early twenties and took the initiative to propose to him, suddenly, years later. Mrs. Gascoyne suggests, before we meet the young couple, that her new daughter-in-law simply settled on her son after running out of other options—and Minnie declares as much later in the play, during one of several bitter exchanges with her spouse.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
There is more to both these women than what they say and do under duress, though, and the muscular, nuanced performances that Platt culls from his actors underline the complex emotional and social dynamics at work here, which extend far beyond the mess created when a newly married man has impregnated another woman. With dramaturg and dialectician Amy Stoller’s guidance, the performers all use a heavy East Midlands accent, but Minnie’s language is rather more refined, and an excellent Amy Blackman gives the character a very different physical bearing, more elegant and fragile than that of her less aspirational husband. Tom Coiner’s Luther is a bracing foil, by turns frightening in his gruff volatility and pitiable when Minnie turns the full force of her disappointment and spite on him.
But as potent and disturbing as the couple’s confrontations can be, The Daughter-in-Law‘s most thought-provoking passages pair Minnie with the character who more nearly matches her inner drive—Mrs. Gascoyne, whom the newlywed implicates in what she describes, repeatedly and brutally, as Luther’s unmanly qualities. Minnie also calls out Joe’s unnatural attachment to his mother, made both comical and unsettling in Ciaran Bowling’s impassioned turn as the younger brother.
Of course, Minnie and Mrs. Gascoyne have more in common than they realize, from their devotion to Luther to their frustration over the obstacles both face as strong-minded women, notwithstanding their different goals and values. Sandra Shipley captures the older woman’s groundedness and her world-weariness with both poignance and humor, allowing us to savor lines such as, “Marriage is like a mouse trap, for either man or woman—you’ve soon come ter th’ end o’ th’ cheese.” Polly McKie lends a more delicate grit as neighbor Mrs. Purdy, mother to the fertile young woman with whom Luther dallied with just before accepting Minnie’s proposal.
Though The Daughter-in-Law resolves on a more comforting (and quaint) note than one might expect, the questions it raises about marriage and family and class are still provocative—and this hearty, stirring production makes them resonate with all the more vigor.
