Chris Eldon Lee reviews Northern Broadsides “Rutherford and Son” which is at the New Vic in Newcastle-Under-Lyme until Saturday 16th March 2013
By rights, Barrie Rutter should be extinct by now. But Britain’s last great actor- manager defies the decades and keeps coming up with pertinent plays and powerful performances. He himself is not the most versatile of actors. It’s often a case of finding a part to suit his personality. But in declamatory roles his stage presence is exceptional, and guest director Jonathan Miller has broadened his vocal range and extended his repertoire of gestures. You have to hand it to Barrie; he’s ideal as John Rutherford and has once more drawn an excellent company around him.
The 100-year-old play itself was almost extinct; an oddity reduced to a handful of performances in uncharted territories until the National Theatre championed it in 1994. Now Northern Broadsides have picked it up, polished the text and taken it on tour. And it’s great!
Gina Sowerby was primarily a children’s writer, the granddaughter of an industrial patriarch who created his glass making empire on the banks of the Tyne – at unknown cost to family harmony. So she was uniquely placed to write ‘Rutherford and Son’ in which, without a scrap of love, the owner of fictional glass making empire destroys his family for the sake of his failing business. It’s a furnace of very grown up writing, so heartrendingly observed at such close quarters it rings with truth. Especially now.
“Business is down and the banks refuse to help”, cries Rutherford as he manipulates his works manager into an act of treason. He’s a totalitarian tyrant but in Rutter’s portrayal there’s a faint trace of likeability about him. And he makes a point that will be understood by any man who has flogged himself to build a business his son doesn’t want to inherit.
The play starts meekly as a mop cap and oil lamp light comedy but builds into an archetypal account of the ultimate decline of any empire (from Woolworths to the USSR) and the fate of those caught in the collapse. Rutherford’s “ungrateful” offspring desert him and his loyal manager, who declines freedom out of fear and habit, is summarily dismissed. But there’s a very feminine pact to be forged before the final curtain, which turns the play on its head. Critics at the time were shocked a woman could write such a critical play. I suspect no man would have dared.
Sowerby’s character writing really is realistic (they must be wonderful parts to play) but I was less convinced by the unlikely fulcrum of the family row. She invents a new white metal that will supposedly make a fortune and refers to its composition as a “recipe” rather than a formula. Briefly, she’s off familiar ground.
But it’s a blip. This is a first class revival full of passion, rage, uncomfortable home truths and the repeated sense of disappointment one generation bears for the next. At half time members of the audience were audibly whispering “Wow!”; and it got even better.
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