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The Bordeaux Book Club by Gillian Harvey #Review #PublicationDay

  Happy Publication Day to Gillian Harvey and Boldwood Books for her latest novel, The Bordeaux Book Club!   Love books? The Bordeaux Book Club is seeking new members! When Leah and her husband moved to France, it was with the dream of becoming self-sufficient. But in truth, it’s not the ‘good life’ she’d imagined, as three hours of digging barely yields a single straggly carrot. Worse, her teenage daughter is acting up, and her husband seems to find every strange excuse under the hot French sun to disappear. So when her friend entreats her to join the new bookclub she’s forming, Leah decides it’s something she will do for herself. The chance to make new friends, to drink a few glasses of wine, and to escape into stories that take her miles away from the life she’d thought would be her own happy-ever-after. But the book club is a strange group of misfits. There’s prickly Grace, who lives alone and seems to know everybody and like no-one. Buttoned-up Monica, who says her husba

Play: Husbands and Sons by D H Lawrence, adapted by Ben Power

Performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester and directed by Marianne Elliott. 





                                     A co-production with the National Theatre.


    Husbands and Sons takes us to the mining villages where D H Lawrence was brought up and has been created by merging three separate plays : A Collier’s Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughter-in-Law.They were not originally written to be seen together and DH Lawrence did not in fact ever see them staged.The result is a look into a whole mining community, in 1911. 

    We are presented with the stories of three different mining families: The Lamberts, Gascoignes and the Holroyds. The staging allows us to see the community as a whole with different areas of the stage given over to each family. The mine itself is ever present with a huge metal frame which is lowered and raised to signify the mine. As the miners walk through the mist across the stage, it is possible to imagine them coming up into the daylight from the dusty depths below.

    In each household are waiting the women of the house. Minnie Gascoigne, newly married to Lucas, has filled her house with more genteel touches. Unfortunately for her, the presence of her mother-in -law looms large over her son. Lydia Lambert is awaiting the arrival of her student son, who she idolises at the expense of her husband. Lizzie Holroyd is torn between her errant husband and an attentive suitor.  

    Although three hours in length, the play moved smoothly on and the three families gave the evening a sense of momentum as the focus moved amongst them. I enjoyed the use of mime to show the ritual of donning hats and coats, which seems to punctuate each family's area. All the domestic activities of eating, washing, dressing served to underpin the enclosed atmosphere within each house and separate them from the mine outside, as each family played out their own power struggle.

In short: an almost claustrophobic look at the tensions within a tight mining community.     

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