THE evening began with bits of untreated cotton falling like snow to the sound of clattering metal, and it ended with an enormous birthday cake being ritually cut in front of the audience. And both events were apt, because a) it’s exactly 30 years since a bunch of bold young men opened a theatre-in-the-round inside the vastness of Manchester’s old cotton exchange, and b) the play now on offer is derived from a novel which is set in the city’s industrial badlands and was written by Elizabeth Gaskell, whose husband was a minister at the unitarian chapel opposite the Royal Exchange’s stage door.
Like Mrs Gaskell’s original, Rona Munro’s adaptation and Sarah Frankcom’s production jointly contrive to be both powerful and preposterous. There’s plenty here that’s melodramatic and sentimental. The hero rescues two men from a raging mill fire and acts as if he’s done little more than save a couple of kittens from a spluttering squib. And, as a subplot, there’s a virtuous tar bashfully in love with a blind girl saintly enough to regard her affliction as a sort of God-given Christmas present.
Yet Dickens was among those who admired Mary Barton when it appeared in 1848, and with good reason. Not only was he gripped by the story of the Chartist’s daughter who comes perilously close to being seduced by the suave son of a mill owner, rejecting the engineer who adores her. But the novel also marked the debut of an author who had observed Britain’s industrial tiger at first hand and wrote about it from the stance of its victims.
Several scenes come across more strongly than they do in the book. There’s a fierce encounter between Mary’s father, Roger Morlidge’s doughty John Barton, and owners who are successfully breaking the strike he has organised in a desperate effort to secure jobs and wages. There’s the episode in which Kellie Bright as Mary is bitterly blamed by the mother of William Ash’s Jem Wilson, who is about to be tried for murdering her upper-class wooer. And there’s a graveyard meeting between two wronged, bereft fathers, one the mill owner and the other the union organiser, that’s packed with a pain that crosses the class abyss and exposes its stupidity.
Let’s not minimise what’s unconvincing. The murder trial, for instance, seems almost more improbable than it does in the novel. But thanks largely to Bright’s performance, which combines toughness, integrity and vulnerability, that’s easy to overlook. You’re too busy watching Manchester’s dark history in riveting microcosm.
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