MTC-Charity
8/25/02
1:03 PM
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Mint Theater Company, “that truffle hound of half-buried treasures from the past” has a celebrated reputation for re-discovering worthy but neglected plays such as Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and Rutherford and Son by Githa Sowerby.
But Hankin is a complex comedian; his sometimes cynical voice, “seems so modern and insightful.” Hankin’s is “the voice of the ruthless observer and true subversive” and his plays present “a blistering expose of the Edwardian middle-class life.” “We leave the theater disquieted by what we’ve seen. And isn’t that what good theater is all about?”
The Mint is thrilled to bring you another “delightful discovery,” from 1906 England, a brilliantly witty comedy of how one family’s all-consuming commitment to kindness has awful and amusing consequences that turns their household upside down. Please make plans to join us for the NEW YORK PREMIERE of this neglected treasure.
By St John Hankin
By St John Hankin “St John Hankin is one of the great might-have-beens of the British theatre… I suspect it was Hankin’s wit that made him underrated…elegant, vitriolic jokes, the voice of the ruthless observer and true subversive…” - John Peter, Sunday Times “A writer who has been unjustly neglected….Like Granville Barker at his best, Hankin wrote adult plays for adult people.” - Malcom Rutherford, Financial Times “…astonishingly unperformed…inhabits a political and dramatic world akin to that of Shaw and Granville Barker…profound and pertinent.” - Micheal Arditti, Evening Standard
George Bernard Shaw called St John Hankin “the Mephistopheles of the new comedy.” Hankin wrote five full-length plays between 1903 and his death at the age of forty in 1909. None of them have ever been seen in New York. Shaw eulogized Hankin as “a most gifted writer of the high comedy of the kind that is a stirring and important criticism of life.” The Charity that Began at Home, Hankin’s third play, tells the story of how one family’s all-consuming commitment to kindness has awful and amusing consequences that turns their household upside down. Guided by the principles of the “Church of Humanity”, Lady Denison and her daughter Margery write letters for orphans, visit the sick, tolerate incorrigible servants and invite the most disagreeable, boring and ill-tempered people they can find to stay with them, because “It’s not what people deserve but what they want that matters. In fact,” say the Church’s charming founder Basil Hylton, “often the less people deserve the more we ought to help them—they need it more.” In 2001 the Shaw Festival in Canada produced Hankin’s second play, The Return of the Prodigal, which became the surprise hit of the season and has been revived again this year (running through Oct. 5). The Orange Tree in London also revived The Return of the Prodigal in 1993. Both productions were celebrated for bringing light to Hankin’s “insightful construction, and dazzling delineation of character” and to his “wonderfully fertile comic invention.” “What a joy to discover” the critics exclaimed, while extolling Hankin’s comic gifts; the “crisp, at times almost Oscar Wildean dialogue,” and the “paralysingly funny one-liners.”
“What a joy to discover” Hankin, along with Granville Barker and Shaw helped further the revolution that returned the function of social criticism to drama. Granville Barker produced the premieres of both The Return of the Prodigal and The Charity that Began at Home. Hankin was, in fact, the only living dramatist other than Shaw to have more than one full-length play produced at the Royal Court during the important Vedrenne-Barker years from 1904 to 1907. Granville Barker rated The Charity that Began at Home as the best of Hankin’s plays and Hankin himself agreed. St John Hankin was a writer truly ahead of his time. When The Dramatic Works of St John Hankin was published in 1912, the New York Times wrote that, “His influence is not to be measured by the fact that the London stage has apparently found no use for him.…To have let a little light and air into the English theater at a time when the windows had for years been shut, and the blinds drawn was no mean accomplishment.” The Charity that Began at Home will play for five weeks only, beginning on September 27th. Please make your plans now to join us for this thrilling discovery. The Charity that Began at Home has never been seen in New York, and was last professionally produced in England in 1917. This may truly be a once in a lifetime opportunity.
St John Hankin (1869-1909) St John (pronounced Sin Gin) Hankin began to contribute humorous essays and dramatic parodies including new “lastacts” for well-known plays to Punch magazine in 1898. In 1901 some of his contributions were anthologized as Mr. Punch’s Dramatic Sequels. Hankin also contributed about seventy drama reviews to The London Times before beginning his career as a playwright in 1903 with The Two Mr. Wetherby’s. Hankin was actively involved in running the Stage Society, a London theater group that supported plays of literary merit, founded in part, to avoid the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship. During Hankin’s youth his father suffered a nervous breakdown, which left him an invalid. Hankin himself began to suffer from increasing ill health in 1907 and he was plagued with the fear that he would suffer the same fate as his father. On a “dull, sultry, wet” day in June of 1909, St John Hankin tied two seven-pound dumbbells around his neck and drowned himself in the river Ithon. He left his wife a letter expressing his fear that he would “slip into invalidism,” which he could not bear and ended by telling her, “I have found a lovely pool in a river and at the bottom I hope to find rest.” George Bernard Shaw described his death as “a public calamity.”
By St John Hankin 311 W. 43RD STREET, 5TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10036 WWW.MINTTHEATER.ORG Permit No. 7528 New York, NY
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