MINT VISITS LANCASHIRE IN 2025.
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On Stage
February 1 - March 15, 2025
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 is best known for his comedy Hobson’s Choice, written a few years after GARSIDE and made immortal by David Lean’s 1954 film starring Charles Laughton as the bootmaker Hobson. Brighouse is one of a few authors associated with the Manchester School” so named for their association with the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester run by Annie Horniman. Other “Manchester
School” plays first presented by Horniman at the Gaiety and later at the Mint include Mary Broome by Allan Monkhouse (Mint Theatre Company, 2011) and Hindle Wakes by Stanley Houghton (Mint Theatre Company, 2017).
Streaming On Demand
January 20 - March 16 2025
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.
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). 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 stilettosharp points instead of ramming them home.” 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.”
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). Brighouse 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 cottonspinning 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.
$59
$39 Tues, Thur, Fri, & Sat @ 7pm Wed, Sat, & Sun @ 2pm Added 7pm performances on Wed. 2/19 & 3/12 No performance on 2/21
MINTTHEATER.ORG Box Office Hours: Tues - Sun. 12 pm - 5 pm Service charges apply for phone & internet purchases
The Manchester School of Dramatists
In the autumn of 1907 Miss A. E. F. Horniman initiated at the Midland Theatre, Manchester, the first Repertory Company in Great Britain. By the spring of 1908 she had acquired the Gaiety Theatre, and established it upon the lines which made it famous. The plays, selected by Miss Horniman and produced by Mr. Iden Payne, set a new dramatic standard for the provinces.
The triumvirate of Allan Monkhouse, Stanley Houghton, and Harold Brighouse represented a significant force in Manchester’s literary and theatrical scene in the early 20th century, particularly through their association with both the Manchester Guardian and the Gaiety Theatre under Annie Horniman.
The Guardian obituary of Monkhouse commented on how the three authors were sometimes referred to as ‘the Manchester school of dramatists,’ “but there was no school about them, nor much in common beyond talent, and artistic ambition, though all were no doubt encouraged to write plays by the animated condition of the Manchester Theatre in their time.”
Allan Monkhouse (1858-1936) was the eldest of the three and worked as a drama critic and literary editor at the Manchester Guardian from 1902 to 1932. His position at the paper allowed him to foster young writing talent, including Houghton and Brighouse. Monkhouse was also a playwright himself, though less commercially successful than his younger colleagues, with works like Mary Broome (1911) and The Conquering Hero (1923) exploring complex moral and social themes.
Stanley Houghton (1881-1913), despite his tragically short life, made perhaps the biggest impact of the three with his play Hindle Wakes (1912). Before his premature death at 32, he contributed theatre reviews and articles to the Manchester Guardian, where Monkhouse served as his mentor. Houghton’s work often dealt with workingclass life in Lancashire and challenged Victorian moral conventions.
Harold Brighouse (1882-1958) is best remembered for Hobson’s Choice (1916), but he too was a regular contributor to the Manchester Guardian, writing drama criticism and articles. Brighouse dedicated Garside’s Career to Allan Monkhouse, and Brighouse wrote a lengthy and personal introduction to the posthumously published Collected Works of Stanley Houghton.
Annie Horniman
Janie Brookshire & Roderick Hill in MARY BROOME by Allan Monkhouse Mint Theater Company (2012)
Jeremy Beck and Rebecca Noelle Brinkley in HINDLE WAKES by Stanley Houghton Mint Theater Company (2017)
Mint Alumni in Garside’s Career:
You might recognize some of these folks! We are delighted to welcome back six Mint Almni to the cast of Garside’s Career. Don’t miss these Mint Favorites!
Sara Haider Partnership (2023)
Sandra Shipley The Daugher-In-Law (2022)
Daniel
The Mountains Look Different (2019)
Madeline Seidman Partnership (2023)
Avery Whitted Chains (2022)
A word from the Artistic Director about casting:
Looking at a page like this, featuring six actors (out of nine) who have previously worked at the Mint might cause you to assume we have something like a resident company—but that is not the case at all. We audition actors for virtually every role in every play, because auditioning is the surest way of making sure we get it right.
It’s far more important to me that we get the actor best suited to their role than it is to work with old friends or familiar faces. We had a wonderful cast for SUMP’N LIKE WINGS, and not one of those actors had previously appeared at Mint before. And we’ve never had a cast like this one, where two-thirds of the cast had worked with us before. However, they are all new to our director, Matt Dickson, who is new to our mainstage. Matt has directed a few readings for us, including Miles Malleson’s Youth in 2019 and his two powerful WWI one-acts in 2018.
Febuary 1 through
March 15, 2025
Tues, Thur, Fri, & Sat @ 7pm Wed, Sat, & Sun @ 2pm
Added 7pm performances on Wed. 2/19 & 3/12
No performance on 2/21
Use code CareerFPC for exclusive FPC pricing
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Box Office Hours: Tues - Sun. 12 pm - 5 pm
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