Season 71 Play 5 – Stringer’s Last Stand by Stan Barstow and Alfred Bradley
Directed by
Cast
Gladys Stringer – Nicola Brook
Luther Stringer – Ian Wilkinson
Bob Carter – Tom Jagger
Jack Carter – Frank Etchells
Marjorie Mather (nee Stringer) – Sarah Carr
Carol Stringer – Ellen O’Keeffe
Ann Fairchild – Jacqueline Scott
Synopsis
Luther Stringer is the titular head of a Yorkshire working-class family of wife and three daughters – one married, one engaged, one a student. His middle daughter’s “fiancy” is in bad odour with him for refusing to participate in a strike and being sent to Coventry. This, however, pales into insignificance before the hornet’s nest that is stirred up when Luther’s eldest daughter discovers an “unexpected item” in her father’s coat pocket. The women’s reaction is instant and their vengeance terrible – but the result is equally unexpected and perhaps unwelcome.
Directors Notes
Stan Barstow was born in Horbury, a railway town on the outskirts of Wakefield in West Yorkshire. His father was a coalminer and “There were no writers in the family (there were, in fact, few real readers),” he once said. Nonetheless Stan Barstow arrived on the literary scene in 1960 with his first published novel: ‘A Kind of Loving’. An unsentimental and unpatronising portrayal of an unhappy marriage, it struck a new note of sombre and sensitive realism. He belonged to a generation of working-class writers who became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like his peers, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey and Keith Waterhouse, Barstow was riding the crest of a wave. Braine’s ‘Room at the Top’ and Sillitoe’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ were already in print, and the vogue for working-class fiction was in full swing. Writers who knew this way of life at first hand had found their moment. The drawing room had been replaced by the kitchen sink, the pub, the factory floor, while standard English gave way to the voice of gritty realistic West Yorkshire passion and eloquence.
‘Stringers Last Stand’ started life as a short story taken from Barstow’s book of short stories ‘A Season with Eros’. The play was developed for radio, working in collaboration with the legendary Alfred Bradley who directed almost everything Barstow wrote for the medium over nearly thirty years whilst working at the BBC studios on Woodhouse Lane Leeds.
