Adapting a novel is rarely straightforward and playwright Nicola Werenowska takes a particularly enterprising stab at it in her version of the DH Lawrence classic. Where this multigenerational novel luxuriates in lengthy interior monologues, full of poetic meditations, sexual longing and self-questioning, Werenowska pulls the focus sharply on its three central women and their passage towards modernity.
Her prime interest is in Ursula (Rebecca Brudner), the early 20th-century girl who takes strides towards the kind of independence longed for by her mother Anna (Jessica Dennis) and impossible to imagine for her grandmother Lydia (Kate Spiro), a Polish immigrant who stepped down the social ladder to settle in rural Nottinghamshire.
Performed as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 by a cast of Polish-heritage actor-musicians, The Rainbow becomes a female-centric tale of emancipation across the decades, in which one generation’s sense of being out of place becomes the next generation’s impulse to take control.
In Jo Newman’s fluid production, Werenowska tackles the novel back to front, creating a kaleidoscopic collage of edited highlights, showing past and present rubbing up against each other. It is a good way to encompass the narrative’s movement from the agricultural to the industrial, the rural to the urban, traditional to modern. With the roving picture frames of Verity Quinn’s set and acoustic folk rhythms of Ela Orleans’s live score, it also provides scope for a free-flowing theatrical style.
But there are downsides too. It is no big deal that it makes the men peripheral, even less knowable than Lawrence’s contradictory portraits, but as a consequence underplays the erotic charge of a novel that was banned for obscenity on publication in 1915.
More of an issue is the breakdown of cause and effect. The restructuring of scenes means we often see actions before motivations; it is hard to identify with characters without knowing the reasons for their behaviour.
And in the end, it hampers the forward direction of the story. The closer Ursula gets to resolution, to strike out on her own terms, the more the play jumps back in time, dragging out the backstory that Werenowska has so vigorously disposed of at the start and prolonging an ending that feels more laboured than liberating.
