Posthumous Triumph

British critics have just discovered "a major dramatist" who turns out to be that old literatus of the libido, David Herbert Lawrence.

D. H. Lawrence has long been admired as both a poet and painter. As a novelist, he was a passionate realist and an impassioned crusader for plain talk about sex. As a playwright, however, Lawrence has been ignored; his eight plays were poorly received on the rare occasions when they were performed during his lifetime, and they were first published in a collected edition only three years ago. Their new eminence is the result of a brilliant repertory pro duction of three of them at London's Royal Court Theater by a relatively un known director, Peter Gill.

A Collier's Friday Night (1909), The Daughter-in-Law (1912) and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914) are all set in the kitchens of proud, poverty-blighted Midlands coal-mining families like Lawrence's own; and all are variations on basic Lawrencian themes--the drunken father, the dominance of women, unrelenting intrafamily contests, and the devaluation of intimacy by privation. The plays are pure naturalism: the kitchen sink is never out of sight, and the weary labor of washing off the pit grime when the man comes home occurs in each of them. Yet, unlike the angry Osbornes and Weskers, Lawrence composes his homely details with the power of tragic necessity rather than the passion of protest.

Lawrence's posthumous triumph as a dramatist is shared by Director Gill, whose careful casting and slow, relentless holding of long silences allow the language to flower in the mind and the subtle relationships of these numb, dumb characters to take form. Seldom in years have London audiences sat so awed and hushed as at the final scene of Mrs. Holroyd, in which the coal-blackened body of a miner (Michael Coles), the victim of a pit accident, lies on the floor of his shack while his widow (Judy Parfitt) begins to wash him, keening to herself:

"My dear, my dear--oh, my dear! I can't bear it, my dear--you shouldn't have done it. Oh--/ can't bear it, for you. Why couldn't I do anything for you? My dear--/ wasn't good to you. But you shouldn't have done this to me. Oh, dear, oh, dear! Did it hurt you? Oh, my dear, it hurt you--oh, I can't bear it . . ."

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