Maurice Elvey and Hindle Wakes: ‘the greatest English play ever written’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Maurice Elvey (1887–1967) was Britain’s most prolific filmmaker, with a long career lasting over 40 years, yet little critical attention has been paid to his work. He was a significant figure in the British film trade, particularly in the 1910s and 1920s, operating in a fast growing but financially challenged industry that faced overwhelming competition from the United States. Before turning his attention to film, Elvey worked in the theatre, taking small roles in mainstream productions, and later gaining the confidence to stage more innovative work. His radical theatrical experiments of the early 1910s were not replicated in his films, where he tended to focus on adaptations of popular melodramas, songs, paintings, and biographies. However, his two adaptations of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1912), which he considered to be ‘the greatest English play ever written’, provide a tangible link between his theatrical and filmmaking careers. This article outlines Elvey’s early experiments with radical theatre, in which he was active around the same time as the first staging of Hindle Wakes; explores his persistence in staging controversial subjects; and suggests that Houghton’s play provided a suitable vehicle for retaining some of that controversy once Elvey was established as a filmmaker. It also offers a close analysis of both Elvey’s lost 1918 film adaptation, based on surviving evidence, and his second 1927 version, which he named as one of the handful of his 1920s films worthy of preservation.