Entertaining tale of bygone era

A strong talking to for Alan (Tristan Brooke) from his wealthy parents (James Quinn and Barbara Drennan)

HINDLE WAKES, Oldham Coliseum, to May 2

ThIS joint Coliseum-Bolton Octagon production has a heavy stamp of the Octagon about it, what with its director being former Octagon boss David Thacker and its tour so far having been at Octagon-like “in-the-round’ theatres.

At the Coliseum the look suffers a little because of the need to fill in the walls of the set — not totally satisfactorily — with large, plain panels, through which a gap offers entrance and exit at the back of Rauri Murchison’s set.

But it’s a minor disappointment in a play that is at times problematic for a modern audience, centred as it is on the morals of a bygone age.

Stanley Houghton’s 1912 light drama, for those who don’t recall a work long since otherwise designated amateur theatrical fodder, has fun with gender hypocrisy, honour, weasel-like behaviour and the differences and similarities between men and the soon-to-be-emancipated fairer sex.

Mill-girl Fanny Hawthorn (charmingly played by Natasha Davidson), goes away for a Wakes weekend in Llandudno with the mill owner’s son, the weasely Alan Jeffcote (played with face-slapping seriousness by Tristan Brooke).

While both consider the dalliance a one-off, since the latter is engaged, his father Nat (the excellent James Quinn), an honourable man and friend of the girl’s father, is willing to make him marry her, though his wife (Barbara Drennan) isn’t keen on a mill-girl as a daughter-in-law

Houghton’s gift is in drawing out, especially in debates between each of the couples involved, the attitudes of the sexes, social classes and generations to this predicament — propriety and honour holding sway, especially if money is involved.

Russell Richardson is a daughter-doting, easy-going father to Fanny while it’s clear his wife (Kathy Jameson) wears the trousers, her gimlet-eyed gaze seeing marriage as the only possible recompense for Alan’s defiling — despite Fanny’s willing participation — of her daughter. Jeffcote’s money isn’t exactly unwelcome either.

Alan’s fiancee, Beatrice (Sarah Vezmar), is a paragon of selflessness while her father (Colin Connor) offers the comic performance of the evening.

Though based on a dilemma that simply wouldn’t exist today, Houghton treads a very fine line between drama — in his day the theme was highly controversial — and the lighter comedy that mollifies the seriousness and highlights hypocrisy.

David Thacker doesn’t go too deeply into the latter and the result is consistently entertaining.