Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Stream.Theatre 

Georgia Lennon and Michael Pickering in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Picture: Mark Senior

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is available on stream.theatre from 15 October until 21 November 2021.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of those novels that everybody has heard of, but far fewer have read. Its biggest claim to fame is that it was the centre of an obscenity trial in 1960, in which the prosecution – in a lack of recognition of the changing times – asked the jury to consider if this was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

That patriarchal attitude, the assumption that the man of the house should be in full control of the intellectual (and other) appetites of his household, was an unintentional reflection of the post-First World War life depicted in Lawrence’s work, and in the stage adaptation which was recorded at the Shaftesbury Theatre over two nights last June for release on stream.theatre.

With music and lyrics by John Robinson (whose previous West End credits of Behind the Iron Mask and Too Close to the Sun are, shall we say, not the most inspiring) and a book by prolific Fringe writer and director Phil Willmott, Lawrence’s novel is pared down to suit a cast of just six.

The key story is left intact, though. Clifford Chatterley (Sam Kipling) returns from the First World War in a wheelchair, and unable to have sex with his new wife, Georgia Lennon’s Connie. She finds comfort with Oliver Mellors, who served with her husband during the war but is now the estate’s gamekeeper.

The first thing that impresses with this production is the two tiered set, Andrew Exeter bedecking the Shaftesbury stage with a thicket of silver birches, atop which sits the austere and unwelcoming panelled rooms of Wragby Hall. Of these, the lower set is the most interesting – as is always the way, from Upstairs, Downstairs to Downton Abbey – and most well-used, especially when the camera gets up on stage with the actors. From an early, creepily lit First World War battle sequence to Connie’s early walking through estate woodlands, there’s a welcome sense of theatricality which all but disappears when action retreats to the stuffiness of the Hall.

And for a musical based on a novel whose portrayal of intimacy and desire between social classes was so controversial, this stage adaptation is at times staggeringly bereft of passion. Robinson’s songs, none particularly memorable, have a tendency to play at all the same tempo. For much of Act I, they merge int and out of an underscore which gives the whole endeavour a sense of monotony. When Connie’s passion is aroused by Mellors with exactly the same pace as her disillusionment with her husband, there’s little for actors or audience alike to latch onto.

This doesn’t stop the cast from trying their best. Michael Pickering is especially strong as Mellors – less swathe and rustic than many film and TV adaptations would have him, instead suggesting that his lower rank and status is due solely to birth, and he is every bit a match intellectually and aesthetically with the moneyed higher classes.

Zoe Rogers also does well as Hilda, a truculent maid that seems to be an amalgam of several characters from Lawrence’s novel, and which are not merged particularly successfully.

A rather more successful transfer from page to stage is Mrs Bolton, the villager who becomes Clifford’s nurse even though, as the owner of the local coal mine, he is in large part responsible for the accident that killed her husband.

The twisted nature of their relationship, with Clifford becoming infantilised in the face of this overbearing maternal figure, is played on several levels by Emma Lindars. She makes Mrs Bolton’s somersaults of character – loveable one minute, scheming the next – feel like they are at least coming from a woman who’s struggling with inner demons. Unfortunately, the book gives her little progression or resolution, which renders her efforts somewhat moot.

But she is far from the worst off in that regard. That dishonour falls to Jake Halsey-Jones as Tommy Dukes, a former comrade-in-arms of Lord Chatterley and who becomes a confidant to his wife.

In the novel, Tommy is painted very much as what we may now term asexual, although it’s possible to read him as a closeted gay man written by a straight man. For the stage, what may have once been implicit is now explicit, with this Tommy open with Connie about his tastes and proclivities. His dialogue is peppered with anachronisms, while his descriptions of his own novel (about a love between two men of different classes) and his friendships with real-world society figures such as Lady Ottoline Morrell are a particularly heavy-handed means of bringing the novel’s own background into this adaptation of the work itself (both Morrell’s affair with a stonemason and EM Forster’s Maurice, itself not published until 1971, are often cited as possible inspiration for Lawrence’s work).

Even attempts to use Tommy’s campness as a source of much-needed levity fall flat. Robinson’s most up-tempo number approximates a Charleston, but Lennon and Halsey-Jones struggle to imbue the moment with anything approaching believability. Perhaps it’s because of the lack of variation in tempo elsewhere that this brief moment seems so out of place.

Act II of this streamed production suffers from some editing issues, at least in the preview cut seen by Musical Theatre Review. Some scenes had audio from multiple takes overlaid on one another, while other scenes suffered from different exposures on each camera – a moodily-lit close-up giving way to a lower contrast, grainier distance shot, say.

While such difficulties do allow one to see just how difficult it is for staged productions to achieve something akin to National Theatre Live productions on a shoestring budget, they also make it harder to recommend Lady Chatterley’s Lover to a paying audience at home.

Still, some elements shine through. While Robinson’s music does little inflame the passions, the orchestrations by Bjorn Dobbelaere, and their performance by a small band under the musical direction of Michael Bradley, have a technical level that is to be applauded. And the whole piece works well as a showcase for several in the cast, most notably Michael Pickering.

Overall though, there is nothing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to frighten one’s wife or servants, but there is little to inspire either.

Scott Matthewman