Garside’s Career tells the story of Peter Garside’s soaring flight from working engineer to member of Parliament, propelled by a ‘silver tongue’ and an insatiable fascination with his power to persuade:
“You don’t know the glorious sensation of holding a crowd in the hollow of your hand, mastering it, doing what you like with it.”
Peter’s fiancé knows the danger of Peter’s fascination, “The itch to speak is like the itch to drink, except that it’s cheaper to talk yourself tipsy.”
Mint’s production of Garside’s Career will be the New York Premiere. The play had an extended run in Boston in 1919 (“admirable in construction, realistic in characterization, bright in wit and keen in satire”) and a New York production was announced, but never happened. Even in the U.K. this bright, witty, political satire seems to have completely disappeared.
HAROLD BRIGHOUSE (1882 – 1958), “one of prewar northern England’s most respected but neglected playwrights” (The Guardian), was a prominent member of the Manchester School of dramatists, alongside Allan Monkhouse (author of Mary Broome, produced by the Mint in 2012) and Stanley Houghton (author of Hindle Wakes, produced by the Mint in 2017). He wrote over 30 plays, including his most famous work, Hobson’s Choice, which premiered in New York in 1915 and was adapted into an acclaimed 1954 film directed by David Lean and starring Charles Laughton.
Brighouse was born in Eccles, Lancashire in 1882. His father, John Southworth Brighouse, was a manager for a cotton-spinning business and prominent Liberal who influenced some of his son’s more politically charged plays. Brighouse won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, but at seventeen he left school and went to work as an assistant buyer in his father’s firm, which was located near a theater. He began to write after watching “an outrageously bad play” and feeling that he could do better. His first produced play, The Doorway, was presented in 1909 by Annie Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre in Manchester, where he began his playwriting career.
Brighouse described himself as “essentially a regional writer,” and his most successful and well-known plays, including The Odd Man Out (1912), The Northerners (1914), The Game (1916), Zack (1916), and What’s Bred in the Bone (1927) are comedies of north-country manners noted for their sophisticated understanding of human nature, deft weaving of drama and comedy, memorable characters, and witty dialogue. He was, particularly, a master of the one-act form — and his early short play, The Price of Coal (1909), ran for two years as a curtain raiser in London. Brighouse’s plays began to be rediscovered, in England, in the 1970s and continue to surprise and delight audiences with their craft, humor, and relevance.
