Mrs Lowry & Son

Adrian Noble (2019)

Not long into it, I thought:  this might have worked better as a radio play.  When I looked it up online afterwards, I discovered that’s what Mrs Lowry & Son originally was, in 2012[1].  It was soon clear too that Adrian Noble’s film was stretching slender material beyond its natural length.  Broadcast on Radio 4, Martyn Hesford’s two-hander ran forty-five minutes – almost exactly half the length of this adaptation of it (with a screenplay by the author).  As a play for voices, Hesford’s account of the relationship between L S Lowry and his bedridden but domineering mother – a portrait of the artist as a henpecked, middle-aged bachelor – might allow the audience to exercise some imagination.  Perhaps not much since the images of places and people that Lowry painted are so well and widely known.  But putting the play on a screen kills it, especially with two strong actors in the title roles.  The faces and physical attitudes of Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall say plenty – enough to mean their dialogue is sometimes surplus to requirements.  Adrian Noble compounds the tautology through the use of uninspired little flashbacks:  Elizabeth Lowry’s younger self (Rose Noble) seated at the piano that she dreamed of playing professionally, she and the child Lawrie (Laurence Mills) together on an otherwise deserted seashore.  There’s even the occasional insertion of a Lowry painting – an extra superfluous visual aid.

The widowed Elizabeth is in constant, querulous mourning for the lost, ‘respectable’ way of life she enjoyed in the Victoria Park suburb of Manchester – a life she’s had to exchange for the grimy, narrow streets of Pendlebury, in nearby Salford.  ‘Enjoyed’ may not be the right word:  in one of the script’s rare amusing lines, she’s precise in telling Lawrie she hasn’t been happy since 1868, ‘the year I was confirmed’.  It’s now 1934.  Disappointed by her husband (Michael Keogh, glimpsed in another of the flashbacks), who died in debt, and now by her son, Elizabeth continually deprecates Lawrie’s art.  She’s infuriated that he wants to portray working-class people and their surroundings in preference to ‘cultured’ things – ‘a nice bowl of fruit’, for example.  She persistently discourages his hopes of a painting career, partly out of fear that might take Lawrie away from her. He has a job as a rent collector, returning each afternoon to make tea then cook supper for them both, before settling Elizabeth down for the night.  Outside the house and his work, Lawrie appears to be socially quite isolated, except for the local kids he plays grandmother’s footsteps with, as he heads up the street towards home.

If Mrs Lowry & Son were sound only, there might be a bit of suspense around whether, when she gets acquainted with a new neighbour who ‘shops at Marshall and Snelgrove’ and is as hungry as herself for better things, Elizabeth is fantasising.  On screen, it’s clear that Doreen Stanhope (Wendy Morgan) is real – so too her husband (Stephen Lord), who lets the side down, being a Socialist for a start, then paying money for one of Lawrie’s unlovely pictures – to Doreen, a distressing reminder of her wrong-side-of-the-tracks past.  What mysteries the film does have, seem to be unintentional.  How is it, when Lawrie gets in each night, that his mother’s voice comes through loud and clear in the downstairs hall, even though, when he then goes up to her room, the door is closed?  On the evidence of their conversations inside the bedroom, her voice is far from strong – or is she feigning frailty?  Knowing little of Lowry’s biography, I never got clear to what extent Elizabeth was pretending to be an invalid.  Her ill health seems to be psychological – she’s neurotic and depressed – rather than physical.  There’s the odd (standard-issue) malade imaginaire joke (she wails she has no appetite, her son asks, ‘One sausage or two?’ and she answers, ‘Three – and a round of bread and butter to help my digestion’).  But there’s next to no suggestion that his mother is able-bodied when Lawrie’s back is turned – unless we’re meant to think that’s how she managed to get talking with Mrs Stanhope.

Another difficulty with the evidence before our eyes is that Timothy Spall is an excessively mature Lowry – even allowing that people-looked-older-in-those-days.  Adrian Noble draws attention to this by dating things specifically, including a short flashback to the child Lawrie, labelled ‘1894’.  He should only be in his mid-to-late forties in 1934 (Lowry was actually forty-seven then) but Spall looks the sixty-two that he actually is.   Maybe we’re supposed just to accept that his mother puts years on Lawrie but you can’t help wondering if Spall struck the film-makers as the go-to actor because he’d recently been Mr Turner.   He hasn’t much to do here; perhaps as a result, he sometimes does too much.   Each time he comes home and his mother calls, ‘Is that you, Lawrie?’, Spall reacts as if it’s a new frustration rather than a demoralising routine.  Vanessa Redgrave, at eighty-two, is about the right age for her role, which she plays more inventively than the script or direction deserves.  Her height and presence make Elizabeth probably too extraordinary a figure:  her authority in the household is proclaimed in her physicality, before she even opens her mouth.  In drama as dull as this one, however, you’re grateful that Redgrave’s maternal tyranny is so striking.

Elsewhere, the infrequent attempts to inject eye-catching life into what’s essentially a dialogue have the quality of aberrations.   On his rent collection round, Lowry arrives at a house outside which a man (David Schaal) sits in his tin bath.  When he rises from it, shouting for a towel, it adds to the embarrassment of his wife (Joanne Pearce), who can’t pay the rent either.  Whether or not Lowry ever painted male nudes, I don’t know (this figure certainly isn’t a matchstick man), but the sequence is incongruous.  The snapshots of Doreen Stanhope’s miserable home life are crudely melodramatic:  Wendy Morgan, an excellent, long underused screen actress (she was brilliant in The Jewel in the Crown back in 1984), is wasted.  When his mother’s behaviour finally causes him to snap, Lawrie prepares a bonfire of his paintings.  Perhaps this really did happen but this too seems overdone, as well as familiar:  it’s what at-the-end-of-their-tether artists usually do on screen.  The cinematographer Josep M Civit’s palette is muted, to put it mildly.  When, late on, Lawrie stands in front of a red door, the effect is almost disorienting.  It’s such an obvious device to render his limited existence as drained of colour – and it isn’t a wholly accurate reflection of Lowry’s own palette, as a montage of his paintings at the end of the film makes clear.

Adrian Noble is a big name in theatre – he was artistic director of the RSC for thirteen years – but this is only his third cinema feature, and the first two were adaptations of stage productions he’d recently done (A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2015)[2]).  No doubt they prefer working in the theatre but there’s another good reason why the likes of Noble and Trevor Nunn, another longstanding RSC chief, rarely make movies.  They don’t seem to know how – as Nunn showed recently with Red Joan (2018) and Noble demonstrates with Mrs Lowry & Son.  It might seem an odd coincidence that both films overuse the music written for them.  Because Noble’s material is dramatically thin compared with Nunn’s, Craig Armstrong’s fancy score for Mrs Lowry & Son is much more intrusive than George Fenton’s was in Red Joan – but the excess of music seems in each case to suggest that the director thinks it’s an inevitable part of what ensures that a film is involving.  This secondhand approach to creating cinema is reflected too in an assumption that, because film-is-a-visual-medium, you can’t have too many images – even if, as in Mrs Lowry & Son, you’ve also got lots of words saying the same thing.  The result is a kind of impaction.  Noble puts a lot of pictures on the screen but they don’t add up to a motion picture.

10 September 2019

[1]  I think originally:  it was also a theatre play in 2013 – I’m assuming that was its first stage production.

[2] In the case of The Importance of Being Earnest, the film clearly was the stage production:   the poster announces ‘Filmed Live at the Vaudeville Theatre, London’.