A Librivox recording of Stanley Houghton's play, Hindle Wakes, in which I took the male parts and Michele Eaton the female parts with Kristingj narrating, is doing moderately well in terms of downloads on Internet Archive. As it turned out, the recording was catalogued on Sept 10, which was a day before the 100th anniversary run of the play opened in London. When I suggested the project, I thought of Hindle Wakes as an obscure and forgotten play that I had come across when searching for authors who had attended Manchester Grammar School (Stanley Houghton being one). More fool me... Here is a summary of what I have gleaned with the help of Mr. Google.
I won't go into Stanley Houghton's life and untimely death - referring instead to the introduction to a three volume edition of his works written by fellow member of the 'Manchester School' of playwrights, Harold Brighouse. Let's go straight on to Hindle Wakes, the highlight of his short but brilliant career. A brief summary of the plot: Fanny Hawthorn takes a holiday trip to Blackpool with her friend Mary. She meets Alan Jeffcote, son of the local factory owner, and the two go off together for a weekend in Llandudno. Unbeknown to her, Mary dies in a pleasure boat accident, and when Fanny returns home, she is forced to tell all. The Hawthorns visit the Jeffcotes (the two fathers are both employer and employee and old friends) and agree that Alan should renounce his fiance, Beatrice, and marry Fanny instead. Alan reluctantly agrees, and only because Beatrice tells him to. In the final act of the play, Fanny unexpectedly speaks up for herself and asks whether anyone has thought to ask what she thinks. She then tells Alan that they have had a good time together but she has not intention to marry him. Rejected by her mother, who had been hoping to turn Fanny's indiscretion into an advantageous match, she then declares that she will live alone and as she likes.
Hindle Wakes was written in 1911 for Miss Annie Horniman's Gaiety Theatre in Manchester, but was staged first in London in 1912, where the play was a hit and Fanny's morality a talking point in the newspapers of the day. In 1913, the play was staged in New York, where it was less popular, but attracted attention from Willa Cather and Emma Goldman. (Catherine Edman's reading of Goldman's essay is bundled with the Librivox recording). Houghton's income from the Hindle Wakes meant that he could move to Paris and concentrate on his writing, but after a series of unexplained illnesses he died of meningitis at the end of the year.
Hindle Wakes was filmed four times. Maurice Elvey directed a silent version of the play in 1918 and a remake in 1927. A talking version, directed by Victor Saville, appeared in 1931 - with Sybil Thorndike (above) taking the role of Fanny's mother - and in 1952 a fourth version appeared, directed by Arthur Crabtree. The 1927 and 1931 versions are generally acknowledged to be the best of these adaptions and the 1952 version the worst, in part because the cast made little attempt at northern accents. A 1976 television version was produced in the ITV Lawrence Olivier Presents series, with an all-star cast including Rosalind Ayres, Trevor Eve, Donald Pleasance and Roy Dotrice.
Hindle Wakes has been performed on the stage many times over the years, notably in a 1996 performance in Manchester that was cut short by an IRA bomb explosion. It was put on again to reopen the refurbished Royal Exchange Theatre in 1998. Hindle Wakes was staged most recently at the Finborough Theatre, London, in September 2012, directed by Bethan Dear. The film versions are also shown in public from time to time and Hindle Wakes is the title of a 2000 recording by Sheffield musicians In The Nursery to accompany the 1927 film.
Reviews of the play have tended to focus more on Fanny's morality than on the merits of the play. The recent London production was advertised as 'Banned, Burned, Revived', but there is little evidence that the first two actually happened, or that Hindle Wakes has ever been away. It is clear enough, though, that in its day Fanny's proto-feminism set tongues wagging in the theatre and the press. Emma Goldman saw her as a role model for female sexuality, while Willa Cather objected to Houghton's ambivalence on the issue (see below). Fanny's choice has, of course, become less and less shocking as the years have gone by, which led one reviewer of Bethan Dear's production to conclude that Stanley Houghton is 'not a playwright for all time'. Stanley Houghton, I suspect, would have been more than a little surprised that, 100 years on, Hindle Wakes had been remembered at all.
From a review by Willa Cather in McClure's Magazine, March 1913
THE only play given in New York this season that touched upon the feminist movement or the industrial position of women at all vitally was Stanley Houghton's new play, "Hindle Wakes." The play did not meet here with a shadow of the success it had in London. It is written in the quiet tone popular among the younger English dramatists, who are so determined not to be artificially conclusive that they are sometimes more inconclusive than they need be. But they are certainly bringing to the stage fresh material; and, cutting into new cloth, they have the right to cut it to a new pattern. The plot is slight, but the characters are very real people, with clearly defined individuality, and the dialogue is living human speech, colored by strong human feelings.... It would have been comforting to the conventional-minded if Mr. Houghton could have added another act showing us where we would find Fanny in, say, five years—whether she was really able to live up to her liberty, whether she recovered from her indiscretion as a young workman would, kept her head, and made the most of her life and her skill. Probably Mr. Houghton would say: "Here is the situation; I don't know where it's leading any more than any one else does."