Garside’s Career

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The Mint Theater Company’s mission is to seek out and revive worthy but neglected plays of the past, many of them masterpieces that fell by the wayside due to more famous works by the same authors. Of course, not all such plays turn out to have their reputations survive intact. One such case is the New York premiere of Garside’s Career (1914) by Harold Brighouse, most famous for the now classic comedy, Hobson’s Choice. While Matt Dickson’s production is both entertaining and engrossing, it is uneven in various ways.

Garside’s Career, a most Edwardian play about the rise and fall of a very ambitious working class man from the Midlands, feels like second drawer Shaw or Galsworthy and at times seems to be influenced by James Barrie and Harley Granville Barker, without coming up to their standards. Peter Garside, a mechanic or draftsman (here referred to as an engineer) has been talked into attending university by his local girlfriend Margaret (we assume at night.) When he passes with honors, she feels that was the goal in itself. He, however, sees it as a stepping stone to a great career. As a result of his being awarded his B.A., possibly a first in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, he is asked by the local Labour Party committee to run for Parliament when their current member steps down. Against Margaret’s wishes but with his mother’s approval, he accepts, telling his women that he can also publish articles and make speeches to increase his income.

When we meet him next he is on the rise and has ambitions toward Gladys, the beautiful daughter of the Conservative Mayor Sir Jasper Mottram. Gladys sees him as her way out of dull Midlandton and on to London – if he wins. His engagement to Margaret is broken even before he leaves for the capital with his mother as his housekeeper. However, Peter does win his seat in Parliament, but it is just like Margaret predicted that his ambition gets to be too much for him and he begins cutting corners. His fall is as quick as his rise and he finds himself back in Midlandton where he began. Now he must start all over.

While Dickson’s production is elegant and pitch-perfect for its 1914 era, the characterizations are partly satiric and off base. While Daniel Marconi is fine as the designing, unprincipled and power-hungry Peter, he seems to be playing him as a comic character with a wink in his eye though there is no evidence in the play that Brighouse intended this. Madeline Seidman’s Margaret is rather bland, failing to show us what Peter first saw in her. As his mother, Amelia White is almost as ambitious and designing a social climber as her son.

The most problematic characterizations are those of the aristocrats who are all played too broadly, rather than true to the period. As Lady Mottram, Melissa Maxwell is almost a gorgon out of Oscar Wilde rather than simply a high class snobbish member of the gentry. Sara Haider’s Gladys fails to give off the kind of signals that would tell Peter she is interested in him, while Avery Whitted as her brother Freddie is practically one of the those silly-ass men of leisure out of P.G. Wodehouse.

As for the Midlandton’s Labour Party officials, Michael Schantz as the too obviously named Karl Marx Jones is too thuggish, while Erik Gratton as Denis O’Callaghan is hardly there, while later appearing as the equally self-effacing butler Timson. Paul Neibanck does a better job with the underwritten Ned Applegarth, an older more diplomatic trade unionist.

Dickson’s elegant production is enhanced by his design team. Christopher Swader & Justin Swader have cleverly handled the need for three sets at different levels of society by having all the furniture and set pieces on stage and having the actors dressed as workmen move them into place. Chris Fields is responsible for the atmospheric Edwardian props. The many period appropriate costumes by Kindall Almond are most memorable for the many stages of Peter’s career from an off the rack suit for his Midlanton life to his tail coat for his London rise. Almond has had a fine time with the fashionable and stylish gowns for the Mottram ladies. Carsen Joenk’s sound design makes us hear the sounds of a factory town as well the mob who storms the Mottram mansion when Garside is late for his speaking engagement in order to keep an appointment with the unseen mayor.

While Garside’s Career is no lost masterpiece and seems to include pieces of more famous plays, it is absorbing and enjoyable. However, you may feel that you have heard it all before. (At times it suggests a D.H. Lawrence story.) Matt Dickson’s production is civilized and polished though its satiric edge does dilute the play’s message. It is surprising, however, that the play has taken so long to be seen in New York considering how famous the author’s Hobson’s Choice has become.

Garside’s Career (through March 15, 2025)

Mint Theater Company

Theatre Row, Stage 4, 419 W. 42^nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-714-2442 ex. 45 or visit http://www.MintTheater.org

Running time: two hours and ten minutes including one intermission