Class war with a hint of Greek tragedy
Strife Minerva Theatre, Chichester ★★★★★
John Anthony (William Gaunt), elderly chairman of the Trenartha Tin Plate Works in Wales, and David Roberts (Ian Hughes), who’s leading a strike at the factory, are at loggerheads.
Their stubborn refusal to contemplate anything approaching a compromise, whatever the sacrifice, fuels this revival of John Galsworthy’s 1909 play. And much of what Galsworthy – most famous for his study of upper-middle-class mores, The Forsyte Saga – says about industrial relations in Britain at the turn of the 20th century still resonates today. You only have to look at the current furore over Southern Rail to detected echoes of his themes such as the owners’ fear of setting a precedent for the future, should they capitulate to workers’ demands.
Actor Bertie Carvel (who gave us the terrifying Miss Trunchbull in the RSC’s inaugural cast of Matilda the
Musical) makes that link to modern times explicit in this production, which marks his directorial debut. It opens on John Humphrys discussing the ill-fated Tata Steel company on Radio 4’s Today programme, before shooting back in time to the era of the play, via audio clips of the miners’ strike in the Eighties and, before that, the nationalisation of the steel industry. It’s a flashback through a fraught landscape.
That emphasis on the struggle between employer and employee being an eternal one is heightened further by stagehands dressed as modern-day factory workers. Their fraught interdependency is there in Robert Jones’s set – in the huge rectangular slab, initially glowing like molten iron, hoisted out of the smoking stage at the start, to become a boardroom table. Backed by Fergus O’Hare’s ominous sound design, there’s something fearsomely totemic about it.
Galsworthy scrupulously portrays the play’s tinder-box situation, where even the union – which won’t support the extent of the men’s pay demands – is the enemy. He packs
Strife with mirroring moments: Anthony attacking the cowardice of his board, while Roberts fires up the men at a public meeting, for instance, or Anthony’s cosseted, do-gooding daughter’s confrontation with a striking worker’s angry girlfriend.
But ultimately, this play feels like a lesson in politics, rather than anything more animating – it has a carefully calibrated structure that engages the brain but feels stilted as theatre. Galsworthy’s characters are invariably eloquent mouthpieces, but flat. This isn’t helped by some static staging that roots the cast distantly apart and, often, to the spot. There are also some inconsistent performances, with Madhav Sharma’s delayed bluster as board member William Scantlebury proving distracting.
Carvel’s approach to framing the play isn’t subtle, hammering home the parallels between then and now by following up on the audio clips with an audience-reflecting, mirrored set. However, for his first time in the director’s seat, he also creates some effective moments that speak louder than words. This includes a clever, class-related game of musical chairs involving a single seat, when Enid, Anthony’s daughter, visits an ill Mrs Roberts. In spite of her loud concern for her host’s health, she sits down in it, leaving her standing up.
And Carvel succeeds in giving Gaunt and Hughes the space to turn Anthony and Roberts into compelling figures. Their performances as two different but intertwined men heat up the dramatic furnace that this production lacks elsewhere. If the real, enduring cost of their struggle is the suffering of others, like Roberts’s wife, their enmity from the boardroom to the factory floor has at times the epic sweep of Greek tragedy.