Theater Review: Harold Brighouse’s Witty ‘Garside’s Career,’ at the Mint Theater

Nearly 50 years ago, Alan Alda’s screen debut as writer, director, and star was entitled The Seduction of Joe Tynan, a step-by-step examination of how a liberal politician becomes caught up in the Washington vortex of ambition, playing to the crowd, and sex. Except for the public niceties still observed in pre-WWI Britain, Harold Brighouse might just as easily have called his anatomy of the same wayward instincts in London “The Seduction of Peter Garside.”

Garside's Career, like other plays mounted at the Off-Broadway venue the Mint Theater, is a lost and neglected play. After premiering at London’s West End in 1914, it enjoyed a successful run on the other side of the Atlantic in Boston five years later.

For some reason, plans to bring it immediately to Broadway were scuttled, and it seems to have disappeared from British stages too, even though Brighouse lived until 1958. So New York audiences are getting their first look at a clever, century-old send-up of a different form of inflation: a young striver’s sudden burst of ego.

If you’re an American TCM fan, you probably know just a little of his work, through David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation of his most successful play, Hobson’s Choice. (An interesting bit of trivia, from the Mint’s playbill for Garside’s Career: Hobson’s Choice was also adapted in 1966 as a Sammy Cahn-Jimmy Van Heusen Broadway musical, Walking Happy. Maybe that one will be revived someday by Encores!? Please?)

But Brighouse wrote more than 30 plays, as well as fiction, journalism, and memoirs. His output is well worth sampling if this production is any indication.

His title character, “silver-tongued” Peter Garside (played by Daniel Marconi) thinks his “genius” for oratory will take him to a station that his newly acquired license as a skilled mechanic (or, in the phrase of the time, “engineer”) can’t even remotely match.

But fiancée Margaret Shawcross, noticing that his gift for public speaking is dangerously intoxicating, warns him against depending on it.

None of this can stand in the face of the irresistible temptation presented by Garside’s Socialist labor group: a chance at a Parliamentary seat in a by-election. Seizing it gives him the opportunity he craves but at the price of his engagement.

Before long, as an MP, he has a comfortable apartment in London, with aspirations for more money, political power—and a permanent end to living in the dingy northern England town of Midlanton. He even makes advances on Gladys Mottram, a provincial siren as bored with her status as the daughter of the most influential family in town as Garside is with his distinctly lower standing.

Garside’s oratorical quelling of rioters about to break into the Mottram home only hardens belief in his political wizardry. But his neglect of meetings and votes that matter to constituents back home trigger a dizzying fall from power.

American audiences of the 21^st century might not be able to identify with the class tensions of pre-WWI Britain, which found their ultimate expression in social welfare legislation passed by the Liberals and the eventual rise of the Labour Party.

But the underlying conflict that Brighouse depicted retains its transatlantic relevance: At what point does the desire to better one’s self involve forgetting your working-class roots and the people who recognized your potential in the first place?

In the battle between capital and labor, Brighouse’s sympathies were decidedly with the latter—a point underscored here when Margaret refuses to back down from her Socialist activism, even when threatened with the loss of her teaching job by the formidable Lady Mottram, wife of the mayor of Midlanton.

Nevertheless, he dispensed with propaganda—one of the group supporting and then bringing down Peter is archly called “Karl Marx Jones,” and he was far more interested in the countervailing emotional and ethical instincts of politicians than their policy considerations.

In one sense, contemporary audiences may find dated the notion that an indiscretion will spell the end of a politician’s career. Nowadays, he (and more often than not, it is a “he”) will try again for public office, after a year or two biding his time—as former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing now.

But Brighouse exposed in the modern political animal a trait that remains intact: egotism that swells with even the slightest audience and deflates with none.

The cast (largely veterans of past Mint productions) play their roles adeptly, starting with Marconi, who expertly navigates Garside’s transition from earnest laborer to pompous MP to political has-been.

Madeline Seidman endows faithful Margaret with appropriate steely love, able to endure in turn Peter’s growing appetite for power, narcissism, brush with scandal, self-pity, and even a gorgon of a mother (with Amelia White making the most of the play’s most hilarious lines). And Sara Haider and Avery Whitted offer a nice contrast as the to-the-manor-born Gladys and her cheerfully superficial brother Freddie.

In the three decades of its existence, I have managed to see more than a dozen productions by the Mint. It has approached each with the kind of attention and loving care that these stepchildren of modern theater have deserved. Harold Brighouse’s play is no different. I urge you to see it before it closes on Theater Row on Saturday, March 15.

Directed adeptly and confidently by Matt Dickson, Garside's Career nicely complements Hindle Wakes, another dramedy by Brighouse’s friend and fellow Northern England playwright, Stanley Houghton. The Mint is offering on-demand screenings of a three-camera HD recording of their 2018 production through Sunday, March 16. Viewing is free after providing your email address and zip code; donations are welcome.