It's risky work, handlin' men, my lass. For when a woman builds her life on men, either husbands or sons, she builds on summat as sooner or later brings the house down crash on her head - yi, she does.
In Husbands and Sons, Ben Power has interwoven three of D. H. Lawrence's greatest dramas, The Daughter-in-Law, A Collier's Friday Night and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Together, they describe the community Lawrence came from with fierce tenderness, evoking a now-vanished world of manual labour and working-class pride.
On the cracked border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire stands the village of Eastwood. The women of the village, wives and mothers, struggle to hold their families and their own souls together in the shadow of the great Brinsley pit.
Husband and Sons by D. H. Lawrence, adapted by Ben Power, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2015 in a co-production with Royal Exchange Theatre.
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...