Husbands and Sons
National Theatre, London SE1

5 stars

DH LAWRENCE’S original, hard-hitting dramastic trilogy — The Daughter-in-Law, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and A Collier’s Friday Night —  is combined here into one towering piece of theatre.

It immerses us, thrillingly, into a world that rarely finds a voice in modern times.

Documenting Lawrence’s own deeply ingrained working-class background, this new adaptation from Ben Power and director Marianne Elliott is marked by authenticity.

But while the three original plays invite us into individual and specific struggles behind closed doors, this larger and more expansive depiction is concerned more with the collective than with the particular.

The play opens with a brooding steel gantry groaning upwards as if from a pit, revealing below an army of miners trudging through the gloom.

On stage, in the round, three homes balance on a gleaming slag heap — the Holroyds’, where a woman and her young son weather the excesses of a drunken and abusive husband, the Lamberts’ — straight from Sons and Lovers — and the Gascoignes’, where a new, risky marriage struggles to survive the status quo.

This is familiar Lawrentian territory — men, the husbands and sons of the title, and their women striving to comprehend the primeval forces that beset them.

Here, however, the emphasis is on the communal struggle as we breathe the colliery air and feel the relentless hardship.

Though the characters speak of an imminent strike, of wages frozen, sick pay denied and the devastating costs of industrial action, it is only in passing.

Working-class consciousness, it seems, is still subliminal, simmering silently and awaiting its moment.

Walls, doors, windows, hats, coats ands shawls are all imaginary and mimed by the actors.

Occasional music, song and sound effects add colour and atmosphere. Light pools show the splatter of inevitable rain on coal. The characters speak in broad but completely accessible dialect and are wonderfully realised by the cast.

Anne-Marie Duff, unsurprisingly, is a heart-rending presence as Lizzie Holroyd and there is a shining performance from Louise Brealey as the out-of-place, increasingly articulate Minnie.

But the heart of the play lies in the aching timelessness of the older characters weathered by the storm.

Susan Brown captures perfectly the fierce resilience of Mrs Gascoigne while Lloyd Hutchinson as Walter Lambert, with his coal-slaked lungs and ingrained skin, gives us at once the brute force of the animal male and the dark heart of our heritage

Runs until February 10, box office: nationaltheatre.org.uk