MikePadgett.com

The last night of Hobson’s Choice

— Treading the boards is John Savident as the cobbler who must tread carefully.”

Most people remember John Savident as Coronation Street‘s recently deceased butcher Fred Elliott.

Fred was a self-made man, a local personality, a mainstay at the Rotary Club. A character on the cusp of extinction in today’s Britain: part of the local Con club scene, part of the furniture along with the photos of once successful football teams and dusty plaques commemorating long forgotten charity events. Fade to brown.

Happily, unlike his character, the actor is still with us and though there are similarities between the affable meatman and the grumpy old cobbler, it was the welcome return of Savident as arch-thesp that made this production of Hobson’s Choice a prospect to relish.

Indeed other people – myself included – remember the actor as a scene-stealer extraordinaire in Remains of the Day and a fistful of other period dramas.

So John Savident was right here, treading the boards at the Sheffield Lyceum as Henry Horatio Hobson, widower, cobbler, father of three aspiring daughters.

Those who remember David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation may recall that Charles Laughton didn’t really play Hobson for laughs, but the stage script was rendered duly hilarious as soon as the starting gun cracked.

Savident’s Hobson rightly dominated the play despite appearing in relatively few scenes, with the unlikely pairing of assistant bootmaker Willy Mossop (an excellent Dylan Charles) and eldest Hobson sister Maggie (Carolyn Backhouse) gelling particularly well. The wedding night scene was beautifully and affectionately played.

Indeed, the performances were all superb, as The Stage pointed out, this was “a cast which never gives less than best” [1].