“Few other plays explore so unflinchingly the profound, and profoundly English, connection between sex, money, and class… Still packs a powerful punch.” The Sunday Times (1998)

It’s “Wakes Week” in Hindle; the mill is closed and the workers are idle. Fanny Hawthorn is relaxing at the seashore with a girlfriend when she runs into Alan Jeffcote, the mill owner’s son. Alan takes Fanny to an hotel in Wales for a few days of fun, but the fun stops when their parents find out. Of course, Alan should marry Fanny—no matter that Alan is engaged already. Should Alan do the right thing and make an honest woman of Fanny, or should he do the right thing and stand by his fiancé? Hindle Wakes mixes questions of ethics, class, custom and morals into an effervescent fizz of comic realism.

“One of the most challenging, original and human plays of the English theatre in our day.” New York Call (1922)

Hindle Wakes premiered in London, in 1912. Many critics called it the best play of the year. The Sunday Times hailed Hindle Wakes as “a work of illuminating force…as timely as it is significant” while the Observer noted, “To see Hindle Wakes is to have enlarged one’s life.” However, the play’s unsentimental depiction of two young people seeking pleasure without commitment sparked moral outrage, filling England’s newspapers with passionate argument over the play’s controversial subject matter.

Hindle Wakes “not only scandalized playgoers, but persons who had never been inside a theatre and who were never likely to visit one joined in the general outcry,” according to The Guardian. Of course, controversy was good for business and Hindle Wakes was a hit.

“It is not extravagant to say, that Hindle Wakes is one of the best plays of modern times.” Theatre Magazine (1922)

In New York that same year, unfortunately, the play flopped. The headline of the Times review branded it as “Very Poorly Acted” and it lasted only 30 performances. New York tried again in 1922—this time the Times acknowledged that, “it is now, as it was then…a shrewd, and nourishing and artful comedy.”

Hindle Wakes is a sly morality tale, sliced out of real life, but “it is life mixed with something, or fermented into something, more exhilarating than the real thing,” wrote the Guardian’s famed critic C.E. Montague, in reviewing a 1924 revival of the play. “Seen last night after an interval of some ten years, the play struck us as an even better comedy than we had felt it to be in its youth…Houghton was surely born with the right touch for a dramatist, and it will be surprising if Hindle Wakes does not keep a permanent place on the stage.” Montague’s prediction has proven true in England, however, Hindle Wakes has not been seen in New York for 95 years.

Director Gus Kaikkonon and the Mint Theater’s production of Hindle Wakes, written by Stanley Houghton, is both authentic to the 1912 original and speaks to issues of our time — a perfect work for a company dedicated to remounting and introducing “forgotten” pieces of theater. Well performed and produced, the work is dramatic and engrossing. It opens with the news of an inappropriate romantic getaway between two young people and follows the community dynamics that arise. Gus was kind enough to answer some questions about the piece and his life in the theater. When the spectators leave the theater at the end of the play, what do you want them to feel and think? I hope they will appreciate Stanley Houghton’s skill in bringing nine very specific people to the stage, each with an individual sense of morality. The play is beautifully and surprisingly plotted, but I think the most fascinating aspect is the different shades of grey that make up the characters belief systems and the family dynamics which are the same now as they were a hundred years ago. How is Hindle Wakes a feminist play? It shows that men and women are more similar than different. Could you tell us about your career in …Read more