In most families, the ‘offspring’ have varying degrees of fondness for their parents and vice versa. But if there is an imbalance – if a parent has an inordinate, excessive influence on their children or an adult has suffered emotional arrested development because they are in thrall of a parent, it is an unhealthy dynamic and doesn’t help anybody. Of course the people within this dynamic usually can’t see with clarity how this affects everyone and outsiders are usually aghast at what they witness…

Directed by Joe Harmston, Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord was last performed in London in 1927. Similar to JB Priestley’s Time and the Conways, with the family gatherings precipitating unwanted change, the return of the eldest son David (George Watkins) to the the Phelps home ushers in baggage from yesteryear. Accompanying David is his new bride, Christina (Alix Dunmore) who he married while overseas – a fact that is more important than it sounds. Waiting for them at the house is David’s brother Robert (Dario Coates) and his fiancée Hester (Jemma Carlton). Last but not least is the matriarch, Mrs Phelps (Sophie Ward). While she is nowhere as ‘severe’ as Dickens’s Miss Haversham, the ‘shadow’ she casts affects the whole household. As ‘the boys’ regress to their childhood roles, their other halves are left to wonder where they fit in, in the scheme of things, if at all.

Howard’s Mrs Phelps predates many of the female characters made famous by Tennessee Williams – Violet Venable (Suddenly Last Summer); Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie); and to a lesser degree Blanche Dubois (A Streetcar Named Desire) – but much of their theatrical DNA can be traced back to Howard’s character. Multi-faceted and complicated as you might expect, her few traumatic years of marriage before she became a widow has steered her towards showering all the love she has to offer to her sons.

With this in mind, where does this leave the other women in the play? Tensions between mothers and daughter-in-laws are as old as time itself, and in this respect this is one of the many things that makes the play still relevant today. In the case of Hester, her ‘outspoken’ nature leads to her being ostracised and gaslighted, while Christina as a modern working woman, (who is also a scientist) is the ‘immovable object’ to Mrs Phelps’s ‘unstoppable force’.

Of course, one can quite rightly blame the men in the play for not fully supporting their fiancée/wife against the manipulative behaviour of their mother. It can also be argued that if their mother had remarried when they were young and the new stepfather was a well-rounded individual, their mother’s love would be sublimated to the proper channels and the sons would have a better example of a healthy loving relationship between a man and a woman. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda…” Be that as it may…

The set design by Alex Marker with the frame-like doors and entrances accentuates the notion that the Phelps residence is a cage, a prison and that unless something inside David and Robert changes, not only will they accept ‘the way things are’, they will depend on it…

© Michael Davis 2024

The Silver Cord runs at the Finborough Theatre until 28th September.