Much-loved rags-to-riches comedy reimagined for Eighties Britain
Hobson’s Choice Manchester Royal Exchange
The Royal Exchange was a bit of a slowcoach when it came to staging Harold Brighouse’s much-loved Lancashire comedy of 1915, about a feckless Victorian boot-shop owner called Henry Hobson who lords it over his three daughters, only to see the boot wind up on the other foot.
It wasn’t until 2003 that the play got its homecoming – it’s set in Salford and alludes to St Ann’s Square, where the theatre is based. The muchpraised period production starred John Thomson as William Mossop, the shy, brilliant cobbler who, thanks to the marital manoeuvres of Hobson’s plucky eldest daughter, Maggie, rises to become a rival entrepreneurial force.
By coincidence, the same year, at the Young Vic, Tanika Gupta had a hit with a novel spin on the action, moving the milieu to the rag trade and turning the Hobsons into a family of Ugandan Asians, part of the exodus caused by Idi Amin. Atri Banerjee’s warm, colourful, astute revival of that version is dominated by pictures of Ted Heath, which loom over the Hobson emporium – Heath having been decisive in letting 25,000 refugees come to Britain in the early Seventies.
What swiftly becomes plain, though, is that there’s moth-eaten nostalgia mingling with the still-spruce gratitude. Gupta has this time set the action in the get-ahead late Eighties (rather than the more blandly Blairite present). A different Conservatism reigns; female assertiveness and individualism are to the fore. The period precision enhances the way Gupta weaves material from Brighouse’s original with multicultural textures to make serio
comic points about shifts of sensibility and power between generations.
Tony Jayawardena’s Hari Hobson – a Hindu who has taken the surname of the tailors he took over – is clinging to a dying order of deference, his assumption of patriarchal privilege a means of holding his own in a world of change and insecurity. The patriotism Brighouse put in the character’s mouth – “I’m British, middle-class and proud of it…” – survives intact with extra stitching: Hari is the archetypal enthusiast for his adoptive land, even to the extent of deriding “phoney asylum seekers scrounging off the state”.
In his brazen chauvinism and putdowns to his daughters, he’s a mixture of comedy grotesque and despicable pig; part baby, part bully. Yet much as we glory in seeing him eventually get his comeuppance, our response is more complex, possibly less overtly entertained than previously. In his recourse to booze, and Lear-like dismay as his girls all turn on him, we glimpse the widower who has long been putting on a front to fit in, and the strain shows. Paradoxically, that acute pressure about belonging and feeling at home is alleviated by his brood’s cool betrayal – they’re modifying the assimilation process, staying true to themselves.
Jayawardena moves you to laughter, then something like sympathy, in taking us from chest-beating paterfamilias to broke and near broken figure. The reverse journey is made with comparable skill by Esh Alladi, as “Ali” Mossop – the Muslim garment guru who twitches under the slightest scrutiny at first, before eventually becoming a sharp-suited man about town. His wedding-night nerves, as Shalini Peiris’s amused, poised Durga (Maggie) awaits, are rendered with a sitcomish charm – he consults the Kama Sutra.
Elsewhere, the “uppishness” that Brighouse had Hobson lambast his daughters for is registered in the bolshie and bling presences of Maimuna Memon and Safiyya Ingar. The occasional longueur aside (the slender yarn is perhaps over-spun), given the classic Hobson’s-choice proposition of “take it or leave it”, my advice would be to take it.