ABSTRACT
There is no space here for more than a brief general account of Lawrence's career as a playwright. During his lifetime, two of his plays were performed and these as well as one other were published at first separately, then in a single volume. The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, perhaps his best play, based on the same material as his short story 'The Odour of Chrysanthemums', was published in 1914, though Lawrence showed a version of it to Jessie Chambers when she visited him in Croydon. The play had an amateur production at Altrincham, Cheshire in 1920 and a professional one by the London Stage Society under the direction of Esmé Percy in 1926. One of the members of the audience at the latter was Bernard Shaw, who later remarked that in comparison with Lawrence's, his own dialogue was stiff and artificial. When the play was successfully revived at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1968, the critic Ronald Bryden described Lawrence as
a master of concentration, of burning intensity, distilling from a naturalism homely as potatoes a fiery, white and ice-cold emotion which shocks like a gulp of liquid energy… When she [Mrs Holroyd] bends over her husband's body to wash it, the whole movement and cumulative meaning of the play gathers in her gesture like a breaking wave.
The only other Lawrence play to be performed in his lifetime was also put on by the Stage Society in 1927 but is in a very different manner. David is a fairly close adaptation of the Old Testament story, focusing on the tension between Saul and David. David can destroy Saul, but cannot himself amount to anything. As Jonathan says to him:
I would not see thy new day, David. For thy wisdom is the wisdom of the subtle, and behind thy passion lies prudence. And naked thou wilt not go into the fire.
