Between 1908 and 1917, Annie Horniman produced more than 200 plays at Manchester’s Gaiety theatre, thereby initiating the repertory movement. Anna Marsland has had the bright idea of reviving four one-act plays by Stanley Houghton, Harold Brighouse and the Manchester Guardian’s own Allan Monkhouse from that period and together they make a lively quartet that tackle war, working-class woes and religion with luminous realism.
The most dramatic is Houghton’s The Old Testament and the New, in which a chapel-going patriarch (James Holmes) and his more easygoing wife (Jemma Churchill) are confronted by the return of their prodigal daughter (Hannah Edwards): Houghton not only pins down the eternal battle between justice and mercy, but suggests there is a touch of madness in the father’s Methodism.
Religion also gets a kicking in Brighouse’s Lonesome Like, in which a widowed weaver (an excellent Ursula Mohan) is about to be shunted into the workhouse. She is saved by the charity of a simple-minded mechanic while the Anglican church stands idly by: as she brusquely remarks, the church has had plenty of brass out of her, but in the end all they send her is “a fine curate with a tuppenny Testament”.
These plays may not be revolutionary in form or content but they expose the sufferings of ordinary men and women. In Brighouse’s The Price of Coal, which is reminiscent of DH Lawrence, we see what the wives and mothers of miners endure while the men risk their lives every day. Monkhouse’s Night Watches graphically shows the fear of a wounded soldier at encountering his ward-mate’s shell shock.
In their ability to deal honestly with working-class experience, the plays of the Manchester School still have a lot to teach us.
- At the Finborough, London, until 13 October. Box office: 0844 847 1652.
