From here to maternity

Even in this somewhat underpowered production, D H Lawrence's The Daughter-in-Law packs a tremendous punch for a minor domestic drama with no sex or violence. I went home afterwards, fell asleep, and dreamt I was being run over by a truck. The effect is even more forceful if your opinion of Lawrence is low, based on novels clogged with portentous rant and risible erotics. But in Lawrence's plays we hear the characters without the author. Men and women of the mining country, they are squeezed tight and dry not only by poverty and brutal work but by rock-hard male assumptions about the place and purpose of women.

Francis O'Connor's set overemphasises the milieu, its cottage in the midst of a coal pile looking like Mole's burrow. But the room itself, with a complicated fireplace oven and the Gothic-lettered motto "I will never leave or forsake thee" over the door, is perfect, a grim yet cosy little refuge where the woman brings her man a washbasin, takes off his boots and stands and serves him his tea.

It would be a mistake, however, to think the women's lot is servitude. The widowed Mrs Gascoigne's sons have always handed her their wages and received pocket money back. The decisions of the household are hers; nor do her sons have to think for themselves. She tells them whom and when to marry, and is put out that, six weeks ago, Luther disobediently wed Minnie, whom she finds impractical and falsely genteel. But Luther, it turns out, has let down not only his mother by his choice of wife. A neighbour announces that her daughter is pregnant with Luther's child.

Yet this moral and financial crisis (the neighbour wants £40 compensation; Luther doesn't have it) proves only a distraction in a marriage already racked with torment. It is obvious, long before Minnie tells Luther so, that she married him only because she couldn't get anyone better. Idle and spineless, he is turning her into a frustrated shrew. In the first of three magnificent scenes that mingle reconciliation and rejection, she says that the source of their troubles is Luther's mother, who has so coddled him and bossed him that he is not a real man. Minnie's accusations enrage Mrs Gascoigne, but they sting her youngest son, Joe, to a realisation of his weakness.

For all his passion, Lawrence blames no one. We sympathise with Minnie, with her mother-in-law and with the men, for whom the emotional demands of adult women are foreign and frightening. Tenderness and sensuality flourish only between mother and son. In an extraordinary moment, the wronged girl's mother (a delightful Annette Badland) picks up Luther's trousers from the floor, smiles, says, "Thou sweats at the hips, as my lads do," and rubs the cloth lovingly against her cheek before hanging them up. She also, unforgettably, jokes that her children are good because they were all "got" on a Sunday: "Their father was too drunk on Saturday and too tired on weekdays."

David Lan's actors fall short of greatness but are all painfully good. The Daughter-in-Law is a fine answer to men who complain that women have lost their maternal qualities. What they really resent, of course, is being expected to grow up.

'The Daughter-in-Law' is at the Young Vic, London SE1 (020-7928 6363) to 12 October