The mill-town wakes were seven days in summer when “the cotton slaves knew the ecstasy of freedom”; or, at least, the ecstasies of Blackpool. Fanny Hawthorn, the self-determined heroine of Stanley Houghton’s 1912 drama, has taken the non-conformist route and gone to Llandudno instead. Even more outrageously, she’s taken the mill-owner’s son with her.
Houghton did not live long enough to capitalise on his most successful play, which scandalised audiences in London, Chicago and New York (a correspondent to the Pall Mall Gazette wrote that “it produced the sensation as if someone had spat in my face”). And though Hindle Wakes hardly seems radical today, Houghton deserves his place in dramatic history for the creation of Fanny, a cotton-town Nora whose rejection of sexual double standards is a resounding strike on behalf of female emancipation.
Houghton was a great admirer of Ibsen – there’s a telling exchange in which the mill-owner’s wife condescendingly remarks that she and her husband spent the wakes at home, having summered in Norway. But David Thacker’s characteristically meticulous production carries the sense that cotton fortunes are rapidly made and easily lost. As the bluff industrialist Jeffcote, James Quinn visibly palpitates with anxiety that his empire is one bad marriage away from dissolution: “You know what they say - it can be three generations from clogs to clogs.”
There’s a fine comic contribution from Colin Connor as a fellow magnate bumptiously proud of his appointment as head of the education committee, despite having barely attended school himself. But the production is chiefly illuminated by the sprightly candour of Natasha Davidson as Fanny, who remains stubbornly impervious to any plans to make an honest woman of her. Her one-woman rebellion unleashes a hunger for liberation that makes it clear a clandestine weekend in Wales is hardly enough: real emancipation is for life.
• Until 21 March. Box office: 01204 520 661. Venue: Octagon, Bolton.
