Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Published Monday 21 August 2006 at 11:30 by Nick Awde

DH Lawrence would have approved of this imaginative reworking of his controversial novel, updated to 1984. It was a tumultous year. Class war raged as Margaret Thatcher’s Tories pulled off a landslide election while sleaze scandals were already breaching their ranks.

An affair, therefore, between the neglected, beautiful wife of a landed Tory grandee and her ex-squaddie groundsman would have been as explosive for Thatcherite Britain as for the times in which Lawrence lived. But the point here, true to his spirit, is that sex is natural and not to blame - it is the constraints of society that are unnatural.

Sally Gooda is both fragile and feisty as Connie Chatterley, chafing at the velvet chains of marriage to her wheelchair-bound impotent husband, a powerful party fundraiser played with world-weariness by Nicholas Thompson. As Connie’s lover Mellors, Paul Stacey uses his working-class animal magnetism to throw up a mirror to her privileged life.

Of course there are sex scenes, and while the frequent nudity is graphic it adds emotional realism to the lovers’ trysts - although perhaps it makes uncomfortable viewing within such an enclosed space, at least from where this reviewer was sitting.

Director Neil McCurley makes inventive use of this venue’s narrow stage and pillars, using Matthew Stacey’s effective lighting to create time and locations, crossfading with cinematographic clarity.

Admittedly the script needs a good couple of editing bouts, and the individual performances are patchy while every non-RP accent obliterates intelligibility. Despite this, the ensemble works commendably hard to produce a work that convinces in the end by being as political as it is passionate.