The Daughter-in-Law, Haymarket Theatre, Basingstoke

DIG deep and you might find something valuable in this play about the trials of a Nottinghamshire mining family in 1911.

But patience and hard work will be required as DH Lawrence penned his work in the dialect of the region, social class and era.

On the first night of the production's run, it seemed the miners of the piece weren't alone in the dark as actors and audience struggled with the heavy accents and foreign phrases.

By the interval you felt like coming up for air. Probably because great chunks of the dialogue were incomprehensible, the characters seemed one-dimensional and the whole thing terribly slow.

But first-night nerves and teething troubles could have been a factor (or maybe we were getting used to the dialect) because after the break moments of clarity revealed an absorbing and occasionally humorous drama about the power struggles between a mother, her daughter-in-law and the men they've devoted their lives to.

Hopefully director Alasdair Ramsay and his cast will keep chipping away at this to give future audience's something more consistent than the first night's occasional flashes of quality.

Until May 10.