Hindle Wakes
A comedy drama by Stanley Houghton
Set in the fictional cotton mill town of Hindle, the play was hugely controversial
when first performed in 1910. It provoked correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette,
in which the author participated, many correspondents questioning whether the
play’s treatment of non-marital sex would set a bad example.
Reviewing the play in its centenary year, Guardian critic Michel Billington called
it, ‘An assault on moral rigidity, whether it comes from the workers or their
bosses. And who is to say that we still don’t live in a world that has one law for
sexually adventurous men and another for women?’
Stanley Houghton belonged to the pre-First World War Manchester school of
playwrights, which included Harold Brighouse who wrote Hobson’s Choice, a
play that also celebrates – to similarly humorous effect – a feistily independent
female protagonist. Tragically, a year after Hindle Wakes transferred to the
West End in 1912, its author died of meningitis at the age of 32.
Red Wall Theatre is a Yorkshire-based community group formed to bring new
or neglected drama, with popular appeal and social ‘edge,’ to a wider audience.
Clement Attlee: a modest little man was its debut production. Hindle Wakes is
its second.
Tickets £10 at www.buytickets.at/redwalltheatre or visit www.redwalltheatre.org.uk
Or in person, in cash please, from St Roberts Club, Monday – Friday, 7-10pm