RUTHERFORD & SON. To 19 February.

Manchester

RUTHERFORD & SON
by Githa Sowerby

Royal Exchange Theatre To 19 February 2005
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Audio-described 12 Feb 4pm
Runs 2hr 50min One interval

TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
box.office@royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 February

Hard domestic times in a less than optimum staging.This play's title is carefully chosen. Glass-manufacturer and family tyrant Rutherford is the only person without a first name. He is remote from his family, living entirely for his troubled company (this production sets the 1912 script in the mid-1880s). He despises and exploits weakness. While respecting his factory manager's skill, he turns him away without a moment's thought when he discovers the man has overstepped his mark.

Rutherford's involved in two major manipulations. Sowerby skilfully shows us one, concerning a secret formula for cheaper glassmaking with which his son had hoped to find independence. The other, which deprives the factory-owner of his strongest-minded child, is developed offstage; onstage action focusing on the consequences for the characters concerned. It's a powerful way to proceed.

And it leaves the final irony, that of & Son. In saving Rutherford's its owner is left with no-one to hand it on to. So, in the previously ignored daughter-in-law, who stays on when her husband quits, the strong man meets his match. Counterbalancing the attempted, quiet rebellion of Janet Rutherford, this is the place in which the play can be claimed as a contribution to feminist theatre.

Sowerby's drama remains forceful, though the Royal Exchange production severely deflates its impact. The Rutherford living-room, complete with maiden aunt, is a place of deadly routine, revolving round its master. It needs to be restrictive, claustrophobic. The Exchange set maroons it on a carpet mid-stage, surrounded by floorcloth illustrations of industrial habitations. The effect is open, sociable the house in a community. What should be oppressive is open and airy.

Maurice Roeves is a slight figure to command this space. He plays the character with a hint of vulnerability and reflection. Yet, though not inhuman (as someone says, he's always right) Rutherford is an instinctive bully, inflexibly and manipulative, utterly certain in placing his firm above all himself included.

Maxine Peake and Antony Byrne achieve a certain tension in their scene together; elsewhere emotion's expressed flat-out, while Mary's final bargaining has an over-deliberate enunciation which dissipates the shock force that finds the King of the board suddenly mated.

Janet: Maxine Peake
Ann: Dinah Stabb
Mary: Christine Bottomley
John: Daniel Brocklebank
Richard: Jonas Armstrong
Rutherford: Maurice Roeves
Martin: Antony Byrne
Mrs Henderson: Joan Kempson

Director: Sarah Frankcom
Designer: Simon Daw
Lighting: Hartley T A Kemp
Sound: Steve Brown
Dialect: Poll Moussoulides
Assistant director: Cheryl Martin

2005-02-06 13:12:57