Empty Bed Blues: Theatre Review

2009-03-09 10:57:31

Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts Centre presents a fascinating portrait of D. H. Lawrence written by the Nottingham-based, Sneinton-born playwright Stephen Lowe. The play takes as its inspiration from a very specific period in Lawrence’s life, just after the completion of his most infamous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
    
The novel and its illicit content had initially been refused by most publishers. In the play, Lawrence and his wife Frieda are looking for a last resort, so they travel to France to visit American publishers Harry and Caresse Crosby to convince them it is a novel ‘worthy’ of Lawrence’s genius.
    
Dantay does credit to D.H. Lawrence's contradictory character
    
Empty Bed Blues depicts an impoverished Lawrence whose moods swing pendulum-like between wry humour and despair. Believing his book to be the necessary shock to induce a sexual revolution, but unable to convince others, the play is a meticulously detailed impression of his artistic struggle. Tim Dantay comes to life as the tortured artist but creates a deeply personal version of this type. A powerful presence on stage, he does credit to the contradictions of Lawrence’s character and the turbulent yet tender relationship with Frieda is convincing.
    
The emphasis on the autobiographical significance of Lady Chatterley is an interesting one and the interpretation of the most notorious of Lawrence’s novels and provides the vital human element. Lawrence and Frieda’s marriage is deliberately paralleled with the liberality of the much younger Crosby’s. Sexuality infuses the stage of Empty Bed Blues just like the narrative of Lady Chatterley and desire openly surrounds Lawrence himself.
    
Passionate crusade against the oppression of desire
    
However, the gap between Lawrence the writer and Lawrence the man is clear. His fiction and its radically candid and celebratory depiction of sexuality stands starkly at odds with his views on his own life. The play makes clear this contradiction between his passionate crusade against the oppression of desire and his own personal adherence to tradition. The play could certainly have benefited from some ruthless editing to avoid the brilliantly acted scenes of Lawrence’s irrepressible passion becoming tired.
    
All in all though, Empty Bed Blues is an exciting, well acted and well produced performance. And the ingenious stage-design that incorporates a revolving set and exquisite projections is definitely well worth a look.
    
Review: Annie Cliffe
    
Empty Bed Blues is showing at Nottingham's Lakeside Arts Centre until 21st March 2009
    

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