Robert Tanitch reviews Hobson’s Choice at Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2
HOBSON’S CHOICE written by the Lancashire playwright Harold Brighouse (1882-1958), was initially turned down by the London theatre managers who had a prejudice against regional writers and the play didn’t arrive in the West End until after a successful premiere in New York in 1915.
Today it is recognised as a modern classic. It is far and away the most enduring and best loved of all the plays of the Manchester school of sentimental realism.
The comedy, set in Salford in the 1880’s, is given a charming 100th birthday celebratory revival by Jonathan Church.
The cast is headed by Martin Shaw as the tyrannical patriarch, a spent force, given to actorish bluster.
Maggie Hobson (a steely Naomi Frederick), already an old maid at thirty, who works in her father’s shoe shop, decides that, if she is not to remain a spinster, she will have to marry Willie Mossop, her father’s master bootmaker. With her brains and his hands, she reckons they would make an unbeatable commercial team.
The bossy Maggie, used to getting her own way, proposes – one of theatre’s great comic love scenes – and Mossop (a resigned Bryan Dick) finds he is engaged to be married whether he likes it or not.
Maggie’s two moments of sentimentality are the more moving for being so rare and underplayed by Naomi Frederick: firstly, when she keeps a solitary flower to press in her Bible and secondly, when she refuses to exchange her brass wedding ring for something grander.
Hobson ‘s Choice is regularly revived and rightly so. It would be nice, however, to have the opportunity to see some of Harold Brighouse’s other plays. Zack has been revived only in Manchesterand on television, I think. Somebody on the Fringe might like to consider reviving his one-acters.
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