The real shock? Lady C’s not just about sex
To THE everlasting frustration of many an eager schoolboy, you have to wade through an awful lot of earnest philosophising to get to the saucy stuff in D.H. Lawrence’s erotic novel.
And if you don’t already know the book that was famously banned, from its publication in 1928 until 1960, it’s the one about the posh lady who has a passionate affair with her husband’s hunky gamekeeper.
But the surprisingly gratifying thing about Philip Breen’s adaptation is that it, too, takes sex seriously — and is all the better for it.
His elegant and thought-provoking production, opening in a week when sex took centre stage — a new version of The Libertine premiered in London, on Tuesday — moves the action from Nottingham to Yorkshire. But it isn’t just a Northern Kama Sutra or Fifty Shades of Grey in Twenties frocks.
Instead, Breen latches onto Lawrence’s ideas about love and sex as rooted in a need for renewal after the hell and destruction of World War I.
Where on TV today, sex is used for steamy Poldarkian purposes, here the full- on nudity is genuinely adult. It emphasises the tenderness and vulnerability of the human body.
This may come as a shock to those who have grown used to the commercial exploitation of sex and its reduction to titillation. Drooling salacity is not on the agenda here.
Instead, Breen’s production is a soulful affair, mixing short, filmic scenes with elegiac piano music on a stage frequently strewn with flowers.
The director manages to persuade us that this is not just a story about a randy lady, enjoying a bit of rough.
It is, rather, a passionate human affair that not only causes pain to loved ones but also to the tut-tutting wider community. Which is not to say that the show is without humour — there are moments of delicious mirth.
But it’s the complex characterisation that is the strongest feature. Hedydd Dylan is a tall, willowy Art Deco beauty as the Lady of the Manor, entombed in a marriage to a husband left paralysed and impotent by war.
She is a woman liberated in mind and body who risks her security — and standing — to pursue her affair. Jonah Russell cuts a tall, lean and taciturn figure as Mellors, the worker who lays everything on the line for the love of ‘our lass’ (to the delight of the audience, Mellors has a Sheffield accent, his wooing peppered with ‘thees’ and ‘thous’). Both are shy yet proud in the raw.
Neither the novel nor this adaptation duck the conse- quences of their actions. Eugene o’Hare’s Clifford Chatterley, as insistently enlightened as he is patrician, urges his wife to satisfy herself and bear him an heir.
HISpomposity in seeing authoritarianism as a ‘ sacred responsibility’ is matched only by his pain at losing his wife’s physical affection.
Similarly, Rachel Sanders, as the matron who nurses Clifford, is both a dour Methodist and a compassionate carer sensitive to the needs of both parties and has a sad, sensual past of her own. There are problems with the sometimes laboured book, not least Lawrence’s contempt for ordinary folk and their ‘petty’ ways (which include fighting for their rights).
Although Breen touches on this, with some cursory representation of Left-wing agitators, his focus is more on the tenderness and pain of human relations.
Where Lawrence railed against the hypocrisy of Victorian repression, Breen demonstrates that he still has much to say to modern audiences, for whom sexuality has become a minefield of political correctness.