St John Hankin (1869 -1909) has been neglected for far too long. In the Edwardian era his social satires were staged alongside those of Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker and much admired by them.
The Last of the de Mullins is about a woman’s right to manage her own affairs and to be totally independent of a father and a husband. Janet de Mullin (Charlotte Powell, good casting) and her 8-year-old son, born out of wedlock, return to the ancestral home in the country, having not been back since she became pregnant. She has carved out a life and a career for herself and she owns and runs a very successful hat shop in London. She does not behave like an audience in 1908 would expect “a fallen woman” to behave. Hankin, very daringly, champions the single mother. Janet refuses to marry the father of her child and she rejects her family’s offer of a home. She does not want her son to be as useless as the moribund De Mullins.
I hope Joshua Stamp-Simon’s agreeable revival leads to other revivals of Hankin’s plays. The Return of the Prodigal, his masterpiece, deserves to be in the National’s repertoire.