"The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd" by D. H. Lawrence

Lace Market Theatre

The tale of Lizzie Holroyd set in Brinsley, a Midlands mining community, a century ago is brutal and gritty. This was Lawrence’s second play, written in 1910 but only published in 1914.

The play's action is set in the kitchen of a miner’s cottage. Elizabeth Holroyd is an educated woman with refined sensibilities, struggling to make a good home for her two children, Minnie and Jack, in the grime and poverty of a Nottinghamshire mining town. Poverty is not the only problem she faces, for her husband, a miner, is a brutish man, prone to fighting, drinking and spending his evenings in the pub.

Blackmore, a mine electrician, recognises Mrs Holroyd as a kindred spirit, and asks her to leave her husband for him, promising to make a new life for her and her children in faraway Spain.

Matters come to a head when Mr Holroyd arrives home from the pub one evening in the company of two strange women, Clara and Laura,‘hussies’ who are his drinking and dancing partners. It soon becomes apparent that his relationship with one of the women, Clara, is more than casual.

One evening later, Mr Holroyd once again fails to return home after work. Believing that he has gone to the pub as usual, Mrs Holroyd begins to take Blackmore’s proposal more seriously. However, she then learns that there has been an accident at the mine.

Clare Choubey (Mrs Holdroyd) really comes into her own in Act Two as she shows a sensitive side as she is tending to her husband. A complete contrast to Act One where the situation is very different.

Phillip Burn (Holroyd), actually looks very much like Lawrence with his facial hair. I can't believe it's been six years since I saw him in "Me Mam Sez" and this is his "comeback" performance. I thought that he was a little restrained but this is opening night.

Malcolm Todd (Blackmore) absolutely nailed the regional accent and he delivered an emotion packed characterisation of the lovelorn electrician.

Hazel Salisbury (Grandmother), although only in the play in the second part, she made an impression and loved the way she warmed herself on the open fire; something that took me back to seeing my mother in the mornings warming herself.

Tamzin Grayson (Clara) was a delight to watch as one half of the pair of "hussies". Fun and fancy free performance with a natural fluidity.

Claudia Langley-Mills (Laura) was her partner in crime as the other hussie.

Henry Vervoorts (Jack) makes his debut with the Lace Market Theatre and a very confident debut this was as well. A very nice natural feel about the character and he handled the accent really well.

Georgia Feghali (Minnie) again convincing as the Holrroyd daughter. She bought the fun child like feel to her character.

Stephen Herring (Manager), Aaron Connelly (Rigley) and Sam Howitt and Malcolm Edwards play the miners who delivered the news to Mrs Holroyd.

Directed by David Dunford, he managed to bring the Eastwood/Brinsley feel of the early 1900s mining community back to life on stage.

The set was designed by Peter Hillier and Gill Newman and what a lovely set this was. the fire in the grate may not have been real but made you feel warm just looking at it, and I loved the appropriate props that went with the piece. It's the little things that make the difference. i just wish that the set had a physical door as it seemed strange to see all the characters entering and exiting through an invisible portal.

Lighting Design is by Phillip Anthony and the Sound Design is by Darren Coxon. Really getting the atmosphere going with the bleakness of the miner's small and dark kitchen, when not lit by candles. The brass band sound creating a "Hovis" feel, and strangely enough, quite a seasonal sound. Brass bands do that to me!

Working with the actors to get the dialect right is voice and dialect coach Janice White and every one of these actors just about cracked this regional accent. Accents can be the most difficult thing to crack, and especially when it's a fairly regional one. I could tell the work that's gone into this area of the play and it really created that special feel to Lawrence's work.

At under two hours with an interval, you won't have time to look at your watch, not that you'll have any need to because the play really captures the local feel of the mining community. A talented bunch of actors and a decent story, albeit not being a happy ending, makes this one play really worth taking time out to see.

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Rarely performed D H Lawrence play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd at the Lace Market Theatre, Nottingham - review

She’s shackled to a husband she dismisses as "vulgar, low-minded and disgusting"

This rarely performed play from D H Lawrence is of obvious local interest. Actually set in Edwardian Eastwood (here called Bestwood), the fictional family depicted is based on Lawrence’s albeit one-sided perception of his own troubled family life. Its themes recur time and again in his work.

Mrs Holroyd (played by Clare Choubey in what must be her best Lace Market Theatre performance to date) thinks herself too genteel and educated for a life of drudgery in a mining village. And she’s shackled to a husband she dismisses as "vulgar, low-minded and disgusting."

She wants rid of him; and she encourages her children (done well by Henry Vervoorts and Georgia Feghali) to think along the same dark lines.

Then he’s stretchered home from a pit accident, dead.

Phillip Burn, as husband Charlie, and Malcolm Todd as Blackmore, who wants Mrs Holroyd to take her children and run off with him, are both splendidly played.

But, in physical terms at least, a role swap might have worked even better, with Todd as the boorish husband and Burns as the more tender and sensitive lover.

Tamzin Grayson’s Clara, a local bad girl of sorts, and Hazel Salisbury’s Grandmother, at once comic and tragic, are played with real distinction.

Period costumes are outstanding, as is the gentle brass band background music. So is the stylised cottage interior, with the ever-present winding gear looming over the action.

The one false note in an otherwise satisfying production is the background track at the end - a folksong. It’s about mining all right. But it’s sung in that irritating accent that exists nowhere on earth except in folksong land.

That said, this is a definite go-see. It’s directed by David Dunford.

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Theatre Review: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd

Be careful what you wish for...

Between 1911 and 1913 DH Lawrence wrote three plays that would be known as the Eastwood trilogy: A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. In 2015 the three plays were combined and conflated in Ben Power’s Husbands and Sons. Although Emile Zola had previously written about coalminers in Germinal (1885) and Vincent Van Gogh moved to the Borinage in Belgium to live among the miners he painted, Lawrence was the first writer, indeed artist, to portray them from the inside.

When Lawrence grew up in Eastwood there were 10 local pits. His father would make the daily mile trek to Brinsley Colliery to help produce 500 tons of coal a day before stopping off for a skinful in the local. When he eventually returned home there would be blazing rows, with the children caught in the middle. Lawrence despised the dehumanising effects of industrialisation and the destruction of the natural landscape - all captured vividly in his early novels and plays. We may not always like the raw characters, but we understand their motivations. They are products of their environment.

Lawrence has taken some stick over the years for his views on women. Some of this has been worthy, some a bit unfair, and some down to simplistic interpretations of his work. Hopefully David Dunford’s direction of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd goes some way to readdressing this balance. Set entirely in the domestic sphere, it highlights the awful predicament faced by women – mothers and wives – in coping with life in a rough mining community.

Mr Holroyd (Phillip Burn) is a loutish miner who spends as much time down the pub as he does down the pit. When he drunkenly stumbles home he brings misery to the tranquillity of the household, either through clattering home with floozies or mouthing off when he doesn’t get his own way. In this production he was cast as a bit of a buffoon, unable to take his shoes off when drunk, and just a bit hopeless. He threatens violence and gets in scrapes, but I didn’t find him intimidating.

Mrs. Holroyd (Clare Choubey) is excellent as the domestic goddess; patiently folding the ironing, looking after the children, and dreading the inevitable calamity about to unfold when her husband comes clattering through the door. But she’s not someone to feel sorry for. She can stand up for herself and gives as good as she takes. She has an interested suitor in Blackmore (Malcolm Todd), a sensitive individual who begs her to leave her no good hubby and elope to Spain with him. Being married to the wrong partner/or in the wrong relationship is a recurring theme in Lawrence’s work.

The two Holroyd children, Minnie (Georgia Feghali) and Jack (Henry Vervoorts), have a good dynamic on stage, bickering and playing. They would be more than happy to leave the misery of their home and set off on a new adventure with Blackmore. Discussions and plans are made, but escape seems unlikely. This is when the simplicity of the set design has its most powerful effect – all the characters are trapped in the front room, with the constant silhouette of the pit headstock looming over them in the distance.

Lawrence could waffle on a bit in his novels. His plays are a reminder of his sharp eye for dialogue, pitching different family members against one another. My favourite character was the Grandmother (Hazel Salisbury) whose entrance later on in the play exudes snobbery and condescension, as she fingers her daughter-in-law’s shelves for dust. She’s pragmatic, tough as nails, and stoic in how she deals with tragedy. The mother of three boys, she warns: ‘I used to thank God for my children, but they’re rods o’ trouble.’ It is only when the men are asleep or dead that the women can find any peace, or connection with each other.

Although the ending of this play is very well known and the title gives it away, I won’t go into detail. Let’s just say be careful what you wish for.

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