Unacceptable faces

A play called Rutherford & Son gripped audiences in London 101 years ago. Set on Tyneside, it was the David Hare-style leftie hit of its season. It depicted the unacceptable face of capitalism, a face that belonged to John Rutherford, who rules the family glassworks by fear, hated by his workers and his children alike. It’s still a fresh, brutal-up-north story of a monstrous control freak devoted to work and money and nothing else.

The show has a terrific twist at the end and it was an instant hit in London, went to New York and was widely translated. But it became a big news story when the unknown author, K.G. Sowerby, was revealed to be a woman. Women did not write plays back then. It stuck in the craw when the critics found out, some of them slimily recanting their positive views of the play. The Daily Mail tracked down its young author. The paper claimed she was pretty, the sort of girl you might expect to see eating chocolates in the shade.

But in fact Githa Sowerby, who died in 1970 aged 93, was tough and serious, a suffragist and a Fabian. She was coy about the source of her material. But she knew what she was writing about. The family in the play was based on her own. Githa had grown up in joyless comfort in Gateshead, where the Sowerby-Ellison glassworks was based, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of pressed glass. Eventually, she made her way to London, where she lived with her sister, and together they successfully published many children’s books.

Since its debut in 1912, her play has been performed just a handful of times. Now it’s to get a tour by Northern Broadsides, whose actor and boss Barrie Rutter will play the hard-as-nails Rutherford in a tweed suit and stiff collar.