Your father is a control freak
The family business is a millstone round your neck
Home feels like a prison
And yet you have dreams…
This powerful drama written and set in the North of England, 1912, is an unflinching portrayal of an industrial Edwardian family on the brink of collapse.
John Rutherford is a tyrannical patriarch, blind to the hopes and feelings of his family. The success of the family-owned glassworks, Rutherford and Son, takes precedence over everything … even happiness.
In a household run on fear cracks begin to appear. The emotional pitch builds up like a pressure cooker. The dramatic voltage intensifies as Rutherford’s absolute authority is challenged and a catastrophic family mutiny begins to unfold, threatening to destroy his world and his factory.
Ranked by the National Theatre as one of the Top One Hundred Plays of the Century, there are few dramas as deeply human, uncompromising and immediately rewarding as this. Northern Broadsides, directed for the first time by the renowned director Sir Jonathan Miller, bring its trademark gritty, no nonsense performance style to this astonishing play that sees Artistic Director, Barrie Rutter, taking the role of the imperious John Rutherford.