Hobson’s Choice

A programme note for the new touring production of Hobson’s Choice, Harold Brighouse’s 1915 comedy, contains two frankly astonishing revelations. Not only did this most Lancastrian of plays premiere not in Burnley or Blackpool, but in Atlantic City, USA , but when it transferred triumphantly to Broadway, a shocked critic remarked that it contained ‘the most Rabelaisian line ever spoken on the New York stage!’ Evidently all Shakespeare’s unashamedly saucy double entendres, not to mention the endless backpassage jokes that riddle the rudest Restoration romps, must have somehow passed him by.

In my role as The Lady’s theatrical smut-hound, I hung with extra-special attentiveness upon every single word of this Victorian-set tale of an overbearing Salford boot-seller who has a Lear-like run-in with his three ‘uppish’ daughters – who, shock and horror, want to be paid for their work and choose their own husbands – but is outwitted by his eldest, Maggie, everything turning out for the best. And I’d guess that the only sentence with even the teensiest smack of innuendo might be: ‘Great things grow from small,’ the innocent writing exercise that diffident virgin Willie Mossop has been set by Maggie, who has forced him to marry her, and which must be completed before bedtime on his wedding day. Seconds later, Maggie drags the quivering, cowering lad by his ear from beneath a blanket in the parlour and into the bedroom. It’s a funny moment, but hardly filth.

Indeed, part of the pleasure of this play is its old-fashioned values, an intriguing mix of Northern grit, a genuine belief that honest hard grind will be rewarded and a surprisingly forward-looking celebration of female emancipation and an expectation of equality.

Badly judged revivals can be clodhopping. On Simon Higlett’s handsome set, which spins from the wooden shop to Maggie and Will’s basement to Henry Hobson’s parlour, director Jonathan Church’s splendid staging suggests that the play is as well crafted and durable – if occasionally but appropriately creaky – as a classic Oxford brogue.

The marvellous Martin Shaw doesn’t put a foot wrong as the widower and patriarch Henry Horatio Hobson, who throws his considerable weight around with increasing blinkered brutality and a boozy blotchiness. He intends, he says, to choose husbands for his two younger daughters. Maggie, he announces, with a cruel lack of tact, is past her sell-by.

So it’s a delight to see Naomi Frederick’s brisk Maggie bravely defying him, and forcing Mossop to dump his fiancée and set up in partnership with her. Under her crisp but comic, tough but tender tutelage, she makes a prince of Willie’s frog, and a man of her monstrous father. Cutting-edge a century ago, this remains sturdy enough to leave an impressive and amusing boot-print.

On tour until 16 April: 01225- 448844, www.theatreroyal.org.uk/page/3832/hobsons-choice