![]() ![]() It’s the wives and mothers, too, who put in the best performances. The title is a provocation by Power that this play isn’t really husbands and sons, it’s wives and mothers. ![]() They demand supper, they mete out the housekeeping money, they drink and stink and prop up the patriarchy. ![]() The men return from the pit caked in coal dust. There’s the Gascoignes, consisting of a newlywed girl who has to keep house for her husband and fend off her protective mother in law the Holroyds, a woman with a young son and alcoholic husband and the Lamberts, a mother coming to terms with her son outgrowing his need for her advice or her company.Īll three families are miner families. It’s an entirely fabricated community: Ben Power has woven three DH Lawrence plays into one whole, three families’ stories played out over a few days and nights. Bunny Christie’s set seems to draw on this aesthetic to create a small, early twentieth century village – Eastwood in Nottinghamshire – three houses nestled against each other with the family’s name printed in big letters on the floor and furniture – stove, sink, tables – poking upwards from these architectural floor plans. On Google maps the buildings poke up in 3D while the streets remain flat, their names imprinted in big letters. The husbands and sons of a work equally, or more so, about wives and daughters. ![]()
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