“It seems to me there’s nae end tae trouble. Nae end tae havin’ the heart torn out of you.” That’s the gut-wrenching cry of despair voiced by Maggie Morrison, the worn-down woman who is herself the heart of Ena Lamont Stewart’s vivid, sprawling 1947 drama. The piece was voted one of the 100 greatest plays of the 20th century in the National Theatre’s millennium poll; yet, aside from a landmark revival by Scottish company 7:84 back in 1982, it’s rarely been seen. Now young director Josie Rourke, who currently helms the Bush Theatre in west London, seizes upon the work for her South Bank debut. The results are nothing short of sensational.
Rourke's production begins, in a meticulous, pungent design for the Lyttelton stage by Bunny Christie, eloquently lit by James Farncombe, with two rows of irritable female faces at two rows of windows, glowing in the grey, soot-stained edifice of a 1930s Glasgow tenement. The women’s voices call out to their children, unseen in the street below – yells of admonishment, commands to come home to dinner or to bed. The frontage melts away, revealing a cross-section view of several cramped homes, where the mottled walls seem almost to exhale deprivation and disease.
Yet these grim domiciles teem with life. Prams are parked on the dingy stairwell; and as Maggie sets about settling her family for the night, her children emerge from every murky corner. To her horror, at least one of them has a head crawling with lice; and though we never see the rats that are mentioned, it’s not hard to believe in them. Irrepressible vitality dances in Michael Bruce’s jazz score, which winds sinuously through the action, by turns ferocious, joyous, melancholy. And it’s there, too, in Maggie herself, played with raw and unstinting honesty by Sharon Small. Why do she and her out-of-work husband John (Robert Cavanah) have so many mouths to feed? “We’re flesh and blood,” she twinkles, her warm sensuality never quite extinguished by the pots to be washed, the skivvying for pennies, the endless worry and the dread, worst of all, that her little son Bertie’s hacking cough could turn out to be a symptom of something very serious.
That’s not the only anxiety, either. Her favourite boy, Alec (Pierce Reid), and his intensely attractive wife Isa (Morven Christie, pictured right with Reid), arrive to swell the household when their own dilapidated home collapses. Isa has married a man for whom she has nothing but contempt; Alec knows it, and desperately clings on to her in rage and desire, while seeking refuge from his misery in booze. Like John and Maggie’s eldest daughter, Jenny (Sarah MacRae), Isa is determined to break free to a life of her own. Both women see sex as their best escape route: Jenny, whose platinum-blonde hair, lipstick and aspirations enrage and wound her father, finds security in an unmarried relationship that to John is no better than prostitution. And though Isa’s humiliation of her husband is cruel, and her flirtations coldly calculated, and while Jenny’s rejection of her home life is brutal, you can hardly blame them: Lamont Stewart makes the alternatives uncompromisingly clear.
Poverty constantly sparks tension between the sexes, and overcrowding renders it explosive. The Morrisons’ upstairs neighbour Mrs Bone can regularly be heard – and in Rourke’s production, glimpsed – taking a savage beating from her husband. Maggie’s sister Lily icily expresses disgust for all men; Alec is derided as unmanly for tolerating Isa’s infidelities and spite; and John, despite his enduring love for Maggie, is not above casting lustful glances at his son’s manipulative wife.
The destiny of all the women and girls in the play is embodied in Granny Morrison (Anne Downie), John’s mother. Huddled by the fire, she is a skilled emotional manipulator; but she is also a pitiful figure, her pension a temptation to the grasping, and her helplessness acutely distressing. There’s a glimmer of hope, in the final scene, that a better future for all – a future in which females will play a new part – is to come; but the change will demand that John jettison many of the norms and mores he has lived by, and Rourke’s direction, which at last shows him slumped, defeated, across the kitchen table, no longer the undisputed head of the household, leaves us in no doubt that he will find the process painful.
With Britain stumbling out of recession and child poverty still an urgent and appalling reality, Lamont Stewart’s play certainly doesn’t lack resonance. But the humanity, vibrance and compassion of Rourke’s production would sing out at any time; and the performances are nigh on miraculous, crammed with colour and detail. In its fecund evocation of a community’s daily life, the work is akin to the Irish theatre of O’Casey and Synge, and Lamont Stewart’s socialism illuminates the world she creates without a tinge of didacticism. There’s suffering, but such unquenchable spirit. It’s an extraordinary achievement.
- Men Should Weep in rep at the National Theatre until 9 January, 2011
- Find Ena Lamont Stewart on Amazon
- See what’s in the National Theatre’s current season
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