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Harold Brighouse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harold Brighouse (1882 - 1958) was an English dramatist and theatre critic.
He was the son of a Manchester businessman and his wife. Born in Eccles, Salford, Lancashire, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School, leaving at the age of sixteen to work in the cotton trade.
His writing career was prolific, and it resulted in over seventy plays, most of which were comedies dealing with people and events of Lancashire. He was one the first dramatists of the twentieth century to turn away from "upper-class" subjects to write about provincial life and the working and middle classes. Brighouse's dominant mode was realism, and he was associated with the Manchester school of realistic drama that also included W S Houghton and Allan Monkhouse. He has been described as the characteristic representative of the Repertory movement
Brighouse's long association with Manchester's Gaiety Theatre, which opened in 1908, included productions of Lonesome-Like (first performed by the Glasgow Repertory Company in 1911), one of his many one-act plays; The Odd Man Out (1912); The Northerners (1914), a play about the Luddites; and Zack (1920). Hobson's Choice (1915), his best-known work, tells the story of the irascible, self-pitying owner of a Salford shoe shop. Its energy and comedy animate Brighouse's portraits of the Lancashire people.
Brighouse continued to work throughout his life as a theatre critic for the Manchester Guardian. His autobiography, What I Have Had, appeared in 1953.
