STAGE REVIEW: Lady Chatterley’s Lover - at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Tuesday, November 1 to Saturday, November 5, 2016.

HERE, in modern day Britain, it’s hard to imagine that DH Lawrence’s steamy novel about love and class was once considered so outrageous and immoral it was banned from public consumption for more than three decades until its famous trial in the 1960s.

It was better than any publicity it could have bought and when victory over the moralists eventually arrived this tale of the lady and the gamekeeper - an early version of a Jilly Cooper romp - flew off the shelves.

Looking back now you wonder why all the fuss but then have to take into consideration that the times, sadly in some instances, have been a changing - and for a good many years.

Even now Phillip Breen’s stage adaptation, he also directs, sticks with Lawrence’s ‘crude’ terminology for the act of lovemaking - along with parts of the human anatomy, and in spite of how far we have gone down the road of almost anything goes it still creates a somewhat uncomfortable feeling.

To be fair it isn’t as notoriously explicit as the original. Creating the sex act on stage is not an easy feat which can easily make the audience cringe, possibly wince, but what transpired between Lady C and her gamekeeper lover Mellors was in general subdued tenderness under Breen’s direction.

A production of only two hours means much of Lawrence’s work is left unsaid as the scenes and seasons rush by at a frantic pace. Hence little litters the stage with scenes woven together by strewn flowers welcoming spring into the woods, golden leaves for autumn, plus assorted boxes, a table and a desk, and the most necessary bed.

All this flitting and fleetness created visual hiccoughs and a spot of confusion.

Hedydd Dylan’s Connie, trapped in a physically loveless marriage, and Jonah Russell’s Mellors offer us a love that is almost true and certainly sensitive but in what are considerably meaty roles it would have been better with a little more flesh on the bone.

I’ve always envisaged Lady C as sensual and well rounded against the muscular ruggedness of a gamekeeper carved out of one of the trees in the woods where he resides.

Picky? Maybe…

Lady C’s paralysed husband Sir Clifford is played with suitable angst, a certain brittleness, by Eugene O’Hare, and Rachel Sanders was in fine form as she doled out compassion by the spoonful as his dutiful and caring nurse, Ivy Bolton.

Lawrence’s work doesn’t simply relate the pleasure of sex and the rights of women to have as much enjoyment from the act, as opposed to duty, while he also takes a swipe at the class divides of England after the First World War and those who rule because of privilege and pounds and the working class who are beginning to find their voice of protest.

This English Touring Theatre and Sheffield Theatres co-production is tasteful, it’s subtly sensitive but unfortunately overall there is no great punch to the proceedings to fully enthuse over.