GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Rutherford and Son, National Theatre London
Contemporary parallels abound in a late Edwardian drama of an industrial oligarch on the rocks
Ruthless: Roger Allam as John Rutherford
[Johan Persson]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
IN THE same week that British Steel was sabotaged by ruthless greed, this revival of Githa Sowerby’s 1912 play Rutherford and Son couldn’t be more timely.
Unlike the shady vultures behind that recent wrecking, here we get a personal portrait of the cold-hearted tyranny of John Rutherford (Roger Allam), whose third-generation Tyneside glassmaking business is beginning to crumble at the same time as his familial relations.
His three long-suffering children — Janet (Justine Mitchell), John Jnr (Sam Troughton) and Richard (Harry Hepple) — have spent their lives tiptoeing around “the Guv’nor” in a house with “not a scrape of love” in it. Janet cowers into a corner as he dresses down John Jnr, while the other women — his sister Ann (Barbara Marten) and daughter-in-law Mary (Anjana Vasan) — remain totally mute in his presence.
Similar stories
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a musical ‘love letter’ to black power activists of the 1970s
FIONA O’CONNOR is fascinated by a novel written from the perspective of a neurodivergent psychology student who falls in love
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare