Review: Hobson’s Choice (Salford Theatre Company)

Friday 8th June 2018
Salford Arts Theatre

Hobson’s Choice was written by Harold Brighouse in 1916. Set in Salford in the 1880s, the play is about bootmaker Henry Hobson and his three daughters, Maggie, Alice and Vickey. This new production by Salford Theatre Company is on at the Salford Arts Theatre from 6th to 23rd June.

It’s fairly standard to see reviews of Hobson’s Choice stating that the play was ‘shocking’ in its day, both for its depiction of female characters and its side-swipe at snobbishness and a rigid class system. Undoubtedly, there are unexpected elements – Maggie’s coercing/bullying Will Mossop into marriage on the grounds of ‘good business sense’, Hobson’s pathetic diatribe on the uppishness of women and the value of the British middle class – but I’m not convinced that these would have been scandalous in 1916.

Maggie Hobson/Mossop is certainly a character who defies feminine stereotypes and behaves in an unconventional way. At 30, she is ‘old’ (a fact that her father points out on a number of occasions), and she rejects romance for sensible business practice. She demands Hobson’s meek boothand Will Mossop marries her, sending away poor Ada Figgins (Will’s erstwhile fiancée) with a flea in her ear, and then effectively puts her own father out of business. But while Maggie doesn’t conform to the stereotype of the polite young lady, she certainly embodies another stereotype – the northern battle-axe. Hobson’s Choice isn’t so much shocking as it is proper northern. Perhaps Maggie would have been seen as an outrageous character if Brighouse had set his play in that London, but she seems perfectly at home in Salford.

The Salford Theatre Company’s production presents Brighouse’s play ‘as is’, i.e. without any attempt to update the material. Their version is a period piece set in 1880 – as the play was always intended to be (being set over 30 years earlier than it was written). Any attempt to modernize Hobson’s Choice or ‘make it relevant’ would only obscure the play’s comical balance of affectionate nostalgia and modernizing desire.

This balance is struck in the Salford Theatre Company’s production quite simply through staging and performance. The period features are there, but not overdone. The sets feel like 1880, but aren’t meticulous or overdressed. The performances aren’t overstated or mannered.

Stand-out performances are Scott Berry as Henry Hobson and Lyndsay Fielding as Maggie. Inevitably, productions of Hobson’s Choice encourage comparisons with David Lean’s 1954 film version – indeed, I heard people in the bar before the show talking about Lean’s film – but Berry and Fielding offered very different performances to those of Charles Laughton and Brenda de Banzie.

Fielding’s Maggie is believable as a not-quite-old-maid with a good business head on her shoulders. No-nonsense and shrewd, rather than bossy and bitter, this Maggie is easy to root for and more three-dimensional than some other portrayals of the character. It’s quite easy to see why Will Mossop quickly comes round to the idea that she’s the woman for him (making the final scenes with the couple all the more enjoyable).

Berry is excellent as Hobson. He avoids a bombastic, larger-than-life performance in favour of a more personable, sympathetic portrayal. Berry’s Hobson is a small man, shrinking back into his outdated beliefs in an attempt to fight off the inevitable. Even his most well-known speech (on the ‘uppishness’ of women) is deflated – as though he already knows he’s on a losing streak. It’s a relief to know he has a daughter (and son-in-law) who can take care of him at the end.

Of the other performances, Elka Lee-Green and Connie James are enjoyable as Alice and Vickey – keeping up a comical array of facial expressions whenever the other characters were talking. Joseph Walsh is likable as Willie Mossop, handling the transition from hapless boothand to confident small businessman well. The warmth that develops between Will and Maggie is convincing and satisfying.

It’s always nice to watch a production of Hobson’s Choice on its home turf. The local references (like Willie’s lines about the metaphorical distance from Oldfield Road to Chapel Street to St Ann’s Square) still make you smile, and Hobson and his daughters haven’t lost their Salfordian charm.

Hobson’s Choice is on at Salford Arts Theatre until 23rd June.

My Year in Books 2018: April

I'm doing alright with this New Year's Resolution business! Didn't get as much time to read in April as previously, as it's been a pretty hectic month, but still found some snatches of time to read a couple of novels for pleasure. And I'm still sticking to my word count for reviews as well. This is probably the best I've ever done with a resolution!

Here are the links to my previous posts from January, February and March. And here are the books I read in April.

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2008; translated by Lucia Graves, 2009)

One thing I’m trying to do with this New Year’s resolution is catch up with the books I’ve borrowed over the past couple of years, then never read. This is another loan from my mother-in-law – though, like The Liar last month, it’s not the sort of thing we normally share. The Angel’s Game definitely has supernatural undertones, but it’s more ‘literary fiction’ than I normally go for. Set in Barcelona in the 1920s, the book tells the story of a struggling writer, David Martín, who begins his career at a newspaper after his father is killed. As David excels in the world of pulp serial fiction, he dreams of writing a ‘real’ novel. Dogged by failure, he’s approached by a mysterious French publisher who makes him an offer that seems too good to be true. The premise had me totally hooked, but I found the novel patchy. Some chapters/sequences were captivating and evocative, but much of the book was drawn-out and tedious. In places, it was rather repetitive and, as with a lot of men’s literary fiction, the presentation of women was awful (we’re only a couple of chapters in before the first Manic Pixie Dream Girl appears, and oh boy! is the protagonist’s mum to blame for a lot). That said, those captivating sequences kept me reading, and I did love the house that is the setting for much of the novel, so it wasn’t all bad. I’m on the fence as to whether this is a recommendation though.

Fall of Night by Rachel Caine (2013)

Fall of Night is the fourteenth and penultimate book in Caine’s Morganville Vampires YA series. I’ve been a fan of the series for a while – I’d go as far as to say the books are the best YA vampire books I’ve read – but I never got round to reading the last two books in the series (collateral damage in my ‘no time to read for pleasure’ situation). It’s been a few years since I read the thirteenth book (Bitter Blood), but it was surprisingly easy to get back into the series. At the end of Bitter Blood, protagonist Claire Danvers had finally helped her uneasy vampire allies defeat the various foes attacking the small Texas town of Morganville, and she’s played her part in setting a new era of human/vampire relations in motion. As a reward, she’s been given permission by head vampire and town founder to leave the town and pursue her studies at MIT (something Claire has dreamed of since she first rocked up in Morganville in the first book). Of course, things aren’t really what they seem and Claire has more enemies (human and vampire) to face. As with the rest of the series, the books feature a likable heroine, with a great team of sidekicks, and vampires that are more three-dimensional than in (perhaps) any other YA series. It’s a fun read, but I’d suggest reading the rest of the series first – so you’re familiar with the characters and the rules of their quirky vampiric town.

Daylighters by Rachel Caine (2013)

I followed Fall of Night straightaway with Daylighters, the fifteenth and final book in Caine’s series. Morganville Vampires is an interesting series in that most books follow on immediately from their predecessor, with some ending on a mid-action cliffhanger. Fall of Night and Daylighters work like this, with the shock ending of the former being the dramatic opening scene of the latter. It’s an aspect of the series that encourages binge reading, and I’ve read quite a few of the books back-to-back. Without spoiling the plot of Fall of Night, I’ll say that Daylighters sees Claire and her (human and vampire) friends return to Morganville after their brief sojourn in Cambridge (the one in Massachusetts) to find that things are very different to when they left – there is, of course, one final battle to be faced. While there were certain aspects of this book I loved – it has all the chemistry of the previous titles, and a certain supernatural creature (sort of) makes its long-awaited appearance in the series – it is a little let down by its continuity, which was really apparent reading it straight after Fall of Night. The problem is that the events of Fall of Night clearly took place over the course of a single week, but several months seem to have passed in Morganville. I did enjoy Daylighters, but this niggle annoyed me, as the rest of the series was pretty tight on chronology and continuity. Not my favourite Morganville book, but still a fun read.

The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid (2014)

The last book I read this month was Val McDermid’s The Skeleton Road. I’ve read quite a few of McDermid’s books, and I’ve enjoyed almost all the ones I’ve read so far (the only one I haven’t liked was A Darker Domain). I picked this one up in a bookshop while we were away and didn’t have any preconceptions about it. I hadn’t clocked that it was in the same series as A Darker Domain, and to be honest I didn’t even notice it had the same detective until I came to write this review! This tells you something about how McDermid does series fiction – it’s not always necessary to read the books in the order they were published, as most of them work as standalones as well as instalments. The Skeleton Road is the third novel to feature Karen Pirie, a cold case detective, and this book begins with the discovery of a decades-old body on the roof of an old school in Edinburgh. The first challenge for the detective is to identify the body, and there isn’t much for her to go on. Interweaving narratives introduce other storylines and characters: a man is killed in his apartment in Crete, a university professor worries about the fate of her Croatian lover, who left her eight years earlier, an International Criminal Tribunal prepares to wrap up its search for Balkan war criminals. The pleasure here is seeing how everything fits together, but also how the characters handle the various revelations.