Perth Theatre
Four stars
When D.H. Lawrence wrote his novel The Rainbow in 1915, his tale of three generations of working class lives saw it hauled before the courts on obscenity charges. More than a thousand copies of the book were burnt, rendering it unavailable in the UK for eleven years in an early example of cancel culture.
Given such an extreme response, one can only speculate what cultural gatekeepers might have made of writer Nicola Werenowska and director Jo Newman’s audacious new stage version, which rips into Lawrence’s story to focus on the three women at its heart.
Lydia is the widowed Polish refugee who lands in rural mid nineteenth century Nottinghamshire where she marries Tom, sevral years her junior. Anna, Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, inherits her mother’s individualism as she embarks on her own domestic battle. By the time Anna’s own daughter Ursula comes of age, the new freedoms she embraces appear to make anything possible. What follows is a series of taboo-busting liaisons that puts sexual liberation at the forefront of personal progress in an already changing world.
Rather than relay this in orderly linear fashion as Lawrence did, Werenowska and Newman have unearthed the book’s feminine pulse to create a much more dramatically fluid affair. As we move between assorted pasts, the play marks out what Ursula can only hope will be a glimmering future.
While Rebecca Brudner’s Ursula is the pivot on which all this hangs, the play’s time travelling structure makes explicit the umbilical links with her mother and grandmother. As the cast move through set designer Verity Quinn’s array of moving picture frames, each crucial moment seems to be memorialised as we go.
With Jessica Dennis as Anna and Kate Spiro as Lydia, this is punctuated by a series of songs composed by Ela Orleans. Orleans’ cracked Polish folk score and vocal chorales are played and sung by a cast completed by Nicolas Goode, Lee Rufford and Laura Andresen Guimarães. These double up as assorted husbands and partners, here relegated to playing second fiddle to the cross-generational three graces.
The play and production have had various work in progress presentations over the last few years, and this full production forms part of the British Council’s UK/Poland Season 2025.
With Werenowska’s dialogue beamed onto Ben Glover’s impressionistic video work in both English and Polish, Newman’s production points up the international language of hand me down experience, be it through words, bodies or minds.
The Herald, March 8th 2025
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