Lancashire playwright Harold Brighouse’s Hobson’s Choice is far and away the most enduring and loved of all the plays of the Manchester school of sentimental realism. Initially it was turned down by the London theatre managers who had a prejudice against regional writers and it didn’t arrive in the West End until after a successful premiere in New York in 1915.
The comedy, set in Salford in the 1880’s, is given a charming revival by Jonathan Church. Maggie Hobson (a steely Naomi Frederick), already an old maid at thirty, who works in her father’s shoe shop, decides that, if she is not to remain a spinster, she will have to marry Willie Mossop, her father’s master bootmaker. With her brains and his hands, she reckons they would make an unbeatable commercial team. The bossy Maggie, used to getting her own way, proposes – one of theatre’s great comic love scenes – and Mossop (a resigned Bryan Dick) finds he is engaged to be married whether he likes it or not.
Martin Shaw as the tyrannical patriarch is a spent force, much given to actorish bluster.