Rutherford And Son To Receive Its North-East Premiere At Northern Stage

Picture from www.northernstage.co.uk

Rutherford & Son, a play by Gateshead playwright Githa Sowerby, will receive its north-east premiere at Northern Stage on September 21 (previews from September 18), a century after it amazed West End and Broadway audiences with its candid portrayal of the industrial North at the turn of the century and the role of women in Edwardian society. It is directed by Richard Beecham, with designer Naomi Dawson, lighting designer Anna Watson with sound and composition by Jon Nicholls.

Cast includes: Tracy Gillman, Laura Haddock, Adam Henderson Scott, Val McLane, Michelle Newell, Fred Pearson, Dickon Tyrrell, Ross Waiton.

"Who are you? A Man that's taken power to himself, power to gather people to him and use them as he wills - a man that'd take the blood of life itself and put it into the Works - into Rutherford's!"

Tyneside, 1912. John Rutherford's glass-making empire is in trouble. A brutal industrialist who has sacrificed his children for the family firm, he is about to count the true cost of his tyranny. With his son-and-heir set on renouncing the family business and his daughter embroiled in a scandalous love affair, the future looks bleak indeed.

To mark the return of Rutherford & Son to its native Tyneside, Northern Stage and Threshold Theatre will be mounting a series of events to celebrate the life and works of Githa Sowerby, including the publication of the first ever biography of this Tyneside playwright, a series of commissions from North East women writers and an exhibition of Sowerby Glass. Both companies are keen to reinstate this groundbreaking, female Geordie voice into the canon of Tyneside playwrights.

Githa Sowerby (1876 - 1970) was born on Tyneside, into the prominent Gateshead Sowerby glass-making dynasty. Her first play, Rutherford and Son, premiered as a matinee performance at The Royal Court Theatre, London in 1912 under a male pseudonym, before moving to the Little Theatre, London , and then the Vaudeville Theatre, where it ran for 133 performances. Her other plays include The Stepmother, Sheila, A Man and Some Women, Direct Action, Before Breakfast and The Policeman's Whistle.

Richard Beecham was born and brought up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He began his directing career as an Assistant Director at Northern Stage and Live Theatre, and has also held positions at the Bolton Octagon, the National Theatre Studio and the RSC. His other productions include The Invention of Love, The School for Scandal, The Miser, Side by Side by Sondheim (Salisbury Playhouse), A Taste of Honey, Neville's Island, How The Other Half Loves (Watford Palace), Humble Boy (Northampton Theatre Royal), The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Private Lives, Charley's Aunt (Northcott Theatre, Exeter), The Bench (Battersea Arts Centre) The Human Cost and Just Before the War (Young Vic, London).

Northern Stage is the North East's premier producing theatre and regarded as one of the top ten producing theatres in the country. The company has a growing reputation for breathing new life into classic texts and presenting them as fresh and relevant to today's audiences; recent productions include a 1950s version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, the first ever revival of Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North and new adaptations of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and The Brothers Grimm Hansel & Gretel. The company also continue to bring the best in national and interNational Theatre to the region. Northern Stage is regularly funded by Arts Council England North East and Newcastle City Council.

Threshold Theatre is a new company dedicated to discovering forgotten, overlooked and marginalized voices from the past and present, Britain and abroad. Established by Richard Beecham in 2009, Threshold makes theatre which aims not only to move, stimulate and inspire, but which invites audiences and artists to cross political, cultural and artistic thresholds in pursuit of new experiences and fresh perspectives.