The eternally popular play, Hobson’s Choice by Harold Brighouse, tells the story of Henry Horatio Hobson, a misogynistic alcoholic who lets his business slide, tyrannizes his three daughters, viciously abuses his pub mates, and falls down a basement door in a drunken stupor, premiered at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester in 1916, when news from the trenches grew increasingly grim. Today attitudes have changed even more than they had between 1880, when the play is set, and 1916. It is easy to imagine how Mike Leigh or Mike Nichols might handle the subject. (Actually, I think Leigh, a native Salfordian, would work wonders with the play.) As undesirable as alcoholism and domestic abuse are, we should confess that we’ve grown a bit pious about them, and if we can’t find humor somewhere in the dark side of life, we’ve lost something. On the other hand, most of whatever sympathy we have for Hobson depends on the character’s Falstaffian amplitude and just how funny an actor can make him.

If Hobson’s Choice continues to be popular today, alone out of Brighouse’s many plays, it is as a period piece. However Brighouse deliberately put this into the play when he made the decision to move the its action back to 1880, apparently in response to the wartime mood. The Victorian shoes which fill the shop, function as a constant reminder of times, which were already distant for Brighouse. It is a well-made play par excellence, with its well-defined dilemma and trickster plot, with plenty of room for tension and wit in its exposition, and characters who learn radical lessons or undergo profound changes as a result. Because of Brighouse’s realistic bent these character developments seem thoroughly convincing and from the heart, and for that reason it is a good play. While we admire Maggie’s determination, we are happy to see her warmer side emerge. With her help, Will undergoes the most obvious transformation. From and illiterate but manually talented scion of the workhouse, he becomes a candidate for the upper bourgeoisie. Hobson evolves from a Falstaff to a Lear.

The reader will no doubt be familiar with the proverb, “Hobson’s Choice,” meaning no choice at all, or rather, “take it or leave it.” The term originates from a mid-17th century stable keeper named Thomas Hobson, who, being of the languid sort, would not permit horse renters the luxury of choosing their horse, but would rather give them the next in line.

Hobson’s Choice has an obvious feminist undertone, which is not surprising as the struggle for women’s suffrage was a very hot topic in 1916, the year of its premiere, only two years before the franchise was granted to women. The story itself, however, takes place in 1880, and the issue of women’s rights gathers more poignancy from this backwards view, Brighouse’s peculiar mixture of progressivism and nostalgia. I can’t help wondering what Sir Edward Elgar thought of it, if he saw it. His father came from a background not unlike Will’s, but, although William Henry Elgar had a shop of his own, he remained stuck in the lower middle classes, and he made matters worse by converting to Roman Catholicism. Elgar never over came this, and I can picture his bitter smile, as Maggie and Will enthuse about their dream of a grand shop in Manchester.

The setting is primarily Hobson’s boot shop in Salford, a large cotton manufacturing town just west of Manchester. It was not different from many British towns during the late 19th century in that its main function was industry and business. Henry Horatio Hobson, a bourgeois shoe store owner, decides to marry off two of his daughters, Vickey and Alice. He claims, however, that Maggie, his eldest daughter at the age of thirty, is far too old for marriage. Maggie then decides to take matters into her own hands. She forces Willie, a skilled boot maker under the employment of Hobson, to marry her and open a competing shop of their own. Soon Hobson realizes that life is utterly impossible without Willie and Maggie, begging them to return. Maggie agrees, but on the condition that he turns the business over to her

and Willie. The plot seems to reflect the newfound emergence of women in society, as well as woman’s time-honored role of “managing things.” Hobson might well be taken to represent John Bull, the common Englishman. Indeed, he claims that his shoe shop is the “backbone of the country.”

John Savident, who has been playing Mancusians since his 1960 debut in Coronation Street, was excellent as Hobson, as was Dylan Charles as William Mossop. Both actors clearly knew their characters well. Together, they both worked to make the play greatly amusing and consequentially quite entertaining. Not all the actors, however, performed with the same panache. At times I found Annabel Scholey (Vickey) almost inaudible.  All the actors pulled together and put on a convincing Lancashire accent for the production. The more pronounced the better in this play, the last surviving example of Manchester Realism. Quite different from The Importance of Being Earnest which was on in October at the King’s.

The production was, though not entirely successful in my view, greatly entertaining, more than once producing tumultuous laughter from the audience.