“Of all the countless Off-Broadway troupes, none has a more distinctive mission – or a higher artistic batting average – than the Mint Theater Company: I’ve never seen a production there that was a sliver less than superb.” Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
It’s “Wakes Week” in Hindle; the mill is closed and the workers are idle. Fanny Hawthorn is relaxing at the seashore with a girlfriend when she runs into Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner’s son. Alan takes Fanny to an hotel in Wales for a few days of fun, but the fun stops when their parents find out.
When Hindle Wakes premiered in London in 1912, many critics called it the best play of the year. However, the play’s unsentimental depiction of two young people seeking pleasure without commitment sparked moral outrage, filling England’s newspapers with passionate argument over the play’s controversial subject matter. Of course, controversy was good for business and Hindle Wakes was a hit.
Not seen in the U.S. in nearly a century, Mint Theater Company’s revival of Hindle Wakes “reaffirm[ed] the play as both well worth knowing in itself and particularly resonant in today’s political climate,” (Village Voice).1 The Wall Street Journal called Hindle Wakes “a study of provincial hypocrisy in Vicwardian England that crackles with a biting candor,” praising Gus Kaikkonen, “one of the deftest directors on the East Coast,” for his direction’s “crisp understatement… letting Houghton make his own stiletto-sharp points instead of ramming them home.”2 Remarking further on Houghton’s skillful storytelling, The New York Times noted that Hindle Wakes “proceeds… gentle as a summer rain until, bam … something electric happens to charge the air.”3
An industrious playwright from Manchester, Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) “startled England with the brilliant originality of his comedies of Lancashire life” (The New York Times). Blending truthfully observed realism with shrewd comic grit and “supremely sophisticated dexterities” (The Manchester Guardian), Houghton wrote over a dozen plays, many of which called for women’s sexual and economic freedom.
Born on February 22, 1881 in the town of Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire, William Stanley Houghton moved as a child to bustling Manchester, where his father thrived as a cotton merchant. After graduating from Manchester Grammar School, Houghton entered his father’s business as a commercial clerk, but devoted most of his spare hours to the theater. As an amateur actor, Houghton appeared in dozens of roles with the Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society, while writing one-act plays. In 1905, he was hired to write stage reviews for The Manchester City News, and soon after became assistant drama critic for The Manchester Guardian.
Under the aegis of theater manager Annie Horniman, Houghton decisively picked up his playwright’s pen. With the vibrant, socially engaged plays of the Gaiety Theatre, founded in 1908 as the first repertory company in Great Britain, the London-born “Miss Horniman invaded Manchester and captured it with her army of ideas” (The New York Sun). Houghton’s first one-act play at the Gaiety, the astringent domestic satire The Dear Departed (1908), revealed the playwright’s “capital sense of theatrical values” (The Guardian).
Over the next four years at the Gaiety, Houghton made consistent progress as a playwright. With his first full-length play, Independent Means (1908), Houghton introduced the free-thinking “woman of ideas” that animated his work. He also stimulated Manchester audiences with The Younger Generation (1910), which The Guardian called “a veracious and highly amusing piece of social satire” in which “the realism is delightful.” The Gaiety’s 1912 London premiere of Hindle Wakes at the Incorporated Stage Society, and then Coronet Theatre, launched Houghton as one of the preeminent young dramatists of his generation, while setting off a shockwave of controversy.
Tragically, only a year and a half after Hindle Wakes, Houghton died of meningitis on December 11, 1913, at the age of thirty-two. The New York Press’s Robert Allerton Parker memorialized the Manchester playwright: “the death of Stanley Houghton has taken away a real force in making the English drama cosmopolitan rather than insular, in widening its appeal while deepening its insight.” Over a century after Hindle Wakes’ much-discussed premiere—and following an acclaimed 2012 centennial production at London’s Finborough Theatre—Houghton’s rousing and “remarkable play” (The Observer) continues to resonate.
POST-SHOW DIALOGUE
Led by Tamsen Wolff, Princeton University
Tamsen Wolff is an Associate Professor at Princeton, where she specializes in modern and contemporary drama and performance, gender studies, cultural studies, voice, directing and dramaturgy. Tamsen will facilitate this discussion, which will feature your thoughts and questions about the play.
“I’M NOT WITHOUT A TRADE AT MY FINGER TIPS.”
Deborah Valenze, Barnard College
Deborah Valenze is a Professor of History at Barnard College, where she also teaches in the Women’s Studies
department. Her research and scholarship have been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation,
and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Deborah is the author of The First
Industrial Woman, published by Oxford University Press. Her discussion will consider the impact of
work on women’s independence, among other issues raised by Hindle Wakes.
“THE ACTORS’ BEST FRIEND”: ANNIE HORNIMAN, PATRON AND INSPIRATION
Maya Cantu, Bennington College
Maya Cantu is Dramaturgical Advisor to Mint Theater Company. She received a D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama. Her book American Cinderellas on the Broadway Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from “Irene” to “Gypsy” is now available through Palgrave Macmillan. Maya will discuss the life and work of Annie Horniman.
