Men Should Weep

Confession: I’ve never seen or read this play before. This is a fairly embarrassing gap in my knowledge, what with me supposed to be a modern British theatre specialist. So going to the National to see this new production was in quite a large part to fill this gap. I didn’t really expect to enjoy myself very much. I knew it was set in the grinding poverty of a Glasgow tenement in the Depression of the thirties. That sounded to me like the recipe for a grim evening.

The Morrison family live in a tenement flat in Glasgow. The father is out of work, the five children range in ages from a baby to around 18. The youngest child is sick, the oldest brother is married to a woman who no longer loves him. The oldest daughter dyes her hair platinum blonde and can’t wait to get out. Maggie, who holds the family together, is a tough, warm woman who longs for better. The youngest boy has developed TB and his only chance of returning home is if they get out. Maggie’s mother lives with them, moving to Maggie’s sister for a short while; she is insistent that she’ll be dead soon and is barely tolerated by the family. The neighbours in the tenement come and go; one is regularly beaten up by her drunken husband. The main action of the story concerns Jenny, the oldest daughter leaving dramatically, taking up with a man with whom she lives, and returning, on Christmas Eve, with an offer to find them a proper flat with hot running water. Maggie is grateful but when the father comes home, he’s furious and grievously insults his daughter and her ‘whore’s winnins’. This pushes Maggie over the edge and she pours out a lifetime of resentment.

It’s a play in five scenes, organised in three acts. The period the play covers is hard to say. The first act is the evening and midnight of a winter day. The second act’s two scenes take place a week and a month later respectively. The last act is Christmas Eve, but the amount that has changed (John’s got a job, Jenny’s got a boyfriend she’s living with, the family have a wireless) suggests that the first scenes might be January/February and the last act December. So it covers just under a year.

Oh my fucking God, what a sensational play. And a sensational production but what a FUCKING extraordinary play. So, here’s the stuff everyone else knew and I didn’t: (a) it’s fucking hilarious. Really, truly, constantly funny and aphoristic, all of it coming out of character and situation; (b) it’s not mawkish or sentimental in the least but the characters have the most extraordinary dignity. Even when they’re making terrible mistakes, even when they are fucked over by one another, they have the most immense sense of value and dignity as individuals; (c) it’s a real slow burner; nothing much happens by way of story until the third scene, which is a good hour into the play, but this gives a chance for the play and the characters to really stretch out and establish themselves in the round; (d) it’s heartbreakingly sad in places. The point where the father returns home and pours his bile on the estranged daughter, but is then met by Maggie’s own invective is desperately awful, sad and humiliating but made of course true and remarkable by the dignity of the character.

I was struck as well by its genre. It’s Naturalism of a very nineteenth-century stripe. Reminiscent in some ways of The Lower Depths, but also of The Power of Darkness, aspects of Strife and The Weavers, it does everything that Naturalism wanted to do; creates a vivid slice of life but also explains the causes behind the behaviour and attitudes of the characters. It may be Britain’s great Naturalist play. (Extraordinary that Naturalism was so long-lived. From 1887 in the theatre, it’s still producing work in 1947. There have been many naturalistic plays since then but have there been any that are Naturalist? I can’t think of an example.)

The ensemble in this production, under Josie Rourke’s direction, are uniformly excellent. It’s a thrill to encounter this play at last.