Harold Brighouse is a very prolific playwright. Within 20 years, he had written 20 full-length plays and over 30 one-act
plays of various kinds. His forte, however, was comedy, especially the comedy of character, with a Midland country emphasis. Of this type of play, and of his plays generally, HOBSON''S CHOICE is the best. He was born in Eccles, near Manchester, England. He attended the Manchester Grammar School, and was encouraged to write plays by a repertory theatre (Miss Horniman''s Gaiety Theatre at Manchester) that preferred work by local authors. At least a half a dozen of the author''s early plays were produced by the Gaiety Theatre.
At the beginning of this play, Henry Horatio Hobson, an older widower, has a fairly prosperous Boot Shop run and staffed by his three daughters and two workmen. He keeps threatening to marry off his two younger daughters, telling Maggie, his eldest (at 30) that she''s too old to marry, because he knows he needs her to help him. Maggie gets angry, and proposes to Willie Mossop, his extremely talented and valuable employee (chasing off Willie''s previously intended, his landlady''s daughter), and then marries him. She also arranges for her sisters to be able to marry their lovers, by doing a spot of blackmail when he gets drunk and passes out in the granary''s cellar. The hush money sets the girls and their husbands up, so that they can marry. Maggie and Willie have started a boot shop themselves in a cellar, and have taken nearly all of Mr. Hobson''s customers'' trade. Mr. Hobson spends a year drinking himself nearly to death. The doctor comes and tells him he has to quit drinking -- and that he needs Maggie back home to take care of him. She won''t do it without her once-milquetoast of a husband. Her husband insists on a full partnership with Mr. Hobson being a silent partner. Mr. Hobson splutters and protests, but he goes along with that plan in the end. It works, and all is well.
This is a really insightful portrait of an alcoholic. He hits bottom the morning that the doctor comes in to see him -- not only thinks he is dying, but has become suicidal in a direct way. The old man says he battled with the razor and won -- it was now out in the yard, but he couldn''t bring himself to shave again. He had lost his daughters and his best workman, most of his customers and was very near losing his life. Yet he still wanted to keep in control, and was blustery and rude to nearly everyone, until Maggie and Willie took him in hand. Yet one senses a deeply unconscious need to be taken care of (which he surrenders to in the end, after making it necessary by his actions, attitude and irresposibility).