Plays

Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel and it was those wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed. The diverse and evocative essays that make up Mornings in Mexico wander from an admiring portrayal of the Indian way of life to a visit to the studio of Diego Rivera and are brightly adorned with simple and evocative details: piles of fruit in a village market, strolls in a courtyard filled with hibiscus and roses, the play of light on an adobe wall. It was during his time in Mexico that Lawrence re-wrote The Plumed Serpent , which is infused with his own experiences there. To read Mornings in Mexico is thus to discover the inspiration behind of one of Lawrence's most loved works and to be immersed in a portrait of the country like no other.

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and human instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage". E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Lawrence is perhaps best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Within these he explores the possibilities for life and living within an Industrial setting. His other works include: The White Peacock (1911), The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914), The Lost Girl (1920), St. Mawr (1925), The Man Who Died (1931) and The Fight for Barbara (1933).

The fight for Barbara Much of it is word-for-word true," Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett; and that is both the play's strength and weakness. Jimmy Wesson, the collier's son, and his aristocratic married lover, Barbara Tressider, are clearly based on Lawrence himself and Frieda Weekley. Their rows and recriminations, as well as Barbara's guilt over her desertion of her distraught husband, closely mirror reality; and when the husband himself turns up, along with Barbara's parents, the stage is set for an epic domestic battle.

Not a lot happens in D H Lawrence's ‘A Collier's Friday Night’ which is one of its chief glories. Eschewing the neat plot-turns and engineered debates of the writers he called the 'rule and measure mathematical folk' (Shaw, Galsworthy, Barker), the 24-year-old Lawrence effectively threw away the rulebook, and created out of the habitual Friday night activities of a miner's family (counting out the pay, courting, baking bread, etc) a lovely sense of the inconsequential drift of ordinary experience. Check out our other books at www.dogstailbooks.co.uk