Hobson's Choice

Hobson's Choice Synopsis

Excerpt from Hobson's Choice: A Lancashire Comedy in Four Acts

His most noteworthy examples of the one-act form are, perhaps, Spring in Bloomsbury, a realistic picture of the hopeless struggle of mediocrity as exemplified in a conscientious but ungifted young London clerk; it is a successful example of what has been defined as the drama of revolt The Price of Coal, a swift little play depicting in bold colours the uncertainties and hazards of the miner's life; it was originally written in Lancashire dialect, but for its first performance by the Glasgow Repertory Com pany it was transposed into the Scottish idiom, in which form it was played several hundred times in Great Britain as a curtain-raiser to Bunty Pulls the Strings, and, especially, lonesome-like, which belongs to the same genre as Hobson's Choice and in which the author reaches a very high development of the one-act form. The theme is simple. A shy young engineer, his sensitive and unconsciously poetic nature stunted intellectually by the rough atmos phere of factory life, is suffering from loneliness since the death of his mother a year before. Failing in his all too clumsy love affair, he turns to an old woman, disabled by rheumatism and about to be taken to the poorhouse, and adopts her as his mother. This is all, but the story is told so winningly, the dialogue is so vibrant with natural humour, and the d�nouement - the old woman's release from the shame of pauperism and the boy's rapture at the solution of his problem - is so neatly turned that the play is a masterpiece in miniature.

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