Theatre review: Rutherford and Son

If it seems like Roger Allam has been building up to playing King Lear for a few years now then Rutherford and Son absolutely feels part of that progression. Although while there’s echoes of Lear in Githa Sowerby’s dictatorial patriarch, even more so he feels like a precursor to Bernarda Alba – trapping his children in dead-end lives for self-destructive reasons of his own – with a story that even suggests Mother Courage in terms of what happens to his legacy. Rutherford owns and runs the Tyneside glassworks founded by his father, which remains the principle employer in his small town. He commands fierce loyalty from his workers, but at home it’s only bullying and intimidation that’s made his children obey him all their lives. For the last few years the glassworks has been operating at a slight loss, and oldest son John (Sam Troughton) has returned after some time in London with a new wife, child, and a formula he believes could cut down production costs significantly and turn around the company’s fortunes.

But where Rutherford believes that, if the formula works, it should rightfully belong to the family and the family business, he’s shocked to discover that John wants to be paid for the rights to use it, and will sell it elsewhere if necessary.

The catalyst for his children finally speaking up for themselves is the arrival of John’s wife Mary (Anjana Vasan) who, however stoically she seems to be taking her new life as a virtual prisoner, can’t help but be a reminder to the rest of the family that not only is there a world outside, but it’s wildly different from the one they’ve got used to. For her own part Mary, almost entirely ignored by her father-in-law, is more astute than anyone gives her credit for; observing the family and biding her time, she can see which way the wind’s blowing and ends up holding all the cards. Vasan makes for a quiet centre around whom the family can implode, while casting an Asian actress lends a different kind of edge to the family’s sniffy dismissal of her.

It also means she makes a contrast to the deathly pallor of Rutherford’s family, who all look like they’ve had the life sucked out of them; John is literally ill, in a constant cold sweat from an unnamed sickness he’s recovering from, while Rutherford’s joyless sister Ann (Barbara Marten) is positively cadaverous. His daughter Janet (Justine Mitchell) is also alarmingly pale, but when her story comes to a crux, even in the face of an uncertain future she seems to have regained some colour to her cheeks. Rutherford and Son reunites Troughton and Mitchell with Beginning director Polly Findlay*, whose production has an ominousness that warns us nobody’s likely to come out of this story well: Lizzie Clachan’s detailed, claustrophobic set is rain-drenched at the start and end of the play, and even during the interval actors continue to wander onto the stage, continuing the feeling of life plodding inexorably on in the big house; while Kerry Andrew and Sarah Dacey’s music is sung live from the Lyttelton’s circle.

Like so much English writing, Rutherford and Son is largely about class, although in this case the divisions are mostly self-inflicted: As factory boss respected by the whole town, Rutherford sees his family as a class above the workers who make up the rest of it, and keeps them apart. But there’s no town around for miles with anyone who matches his precise social standing, and the higher classes think them a joke. Not that Rutherford actually understands anything about the upper middle classes he aspires to; he sent John to Harrow because that’s what other wealthy men did, but took him out after a year for teaching him arts and sciences instead of business. Nobody has suffered more from her father’s narrow social outlook than Janet who, in the absence of anyone deemed of acceptable standing, has never been permitted friends, let alone boyfriends. She’s brought down by her relationship with Martin (Joe Armstrong) who, despite being Rutherford’s right-hand man for 25 years and trusted more than his own children, is still considered inferior as a suitor.

Roger Allam has the kind of avuncular presence that means it’s hard to see him as an outright monster, and much of his fearsome nature comes more from how people talk about him than from the way he carries himself. Still, if the audience laugh along with his jibes for a while there's a tangible shift in attitude when Rutherford tells his younger son Richard (Harry Hepple) with casual cruelty that it’s never made any difference to him whether he’s alive or not. Still, Allam does keep that Lear-like feel that he’s as much a victim of his own inflexibility as anyone else is: All he wants is for his children to carry on his legacy, and even as it becomes obvious he’s making that less likely by the minute, he’s too unable to believe himself capable of error to change his behaviour. The story may take place in a single room over a couple of weeks but Findlay’s production reveals Sowerby’s work as a nuanced tragedy with an epic scope.

Rutherford and Son by Githa Sowerby is booking in repertory until the 3rd of August at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval (the interval comes early, less than an hour in.)

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*it also reunites Troughton with Joe Armstrong, so I’m sure they’ve been able to reignite many an argument about which of them got lumbered with the most obscure Merry Man