Commissioned by the Finborough Theatre, Horniman's Choice brings together four plays by the leading figures of the 'Manchester School' of playwrights – Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse, all originally championed by Annie Horniman, owner of Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, the first regional repertory theatre in Britain. The first professional UK productions for more than 90 years‘If Lancashire playwrights will send their plays to me I shall pledge myself to read them through. Let them not write as one dramatist does, about Countesses and Duchesses and society existing in imaginations, but about their friends and enemies - about real life.’ - Annie Horniman THE PRICE OF COAL by Harold Brighouse 1909. The mines. Collier Jack Tyldesley heads off at 5.30am for another day's hard graft at the coalface. His lover, Mary Bradshaw, has promised to answer his marriage proposal when he returns home, but Jack's mother is haunted by premonitions of disaster. Risk is part of the job, but too often the cost of fuel outweighs the cost of the lives of men. LONESOME LIKE by Harold Brighouse 1911. The mill. Sarah Ormerod has worked in a Lancashire mill for many years, but age and hard work have taken their toll. When she loses the use of her hands, she is condemned to spend the rest of her days in the workhouse, unless someone can help her. Without a welfare state, what happens to the elderly and disabled? THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE NEW by Stanley Houghton 1914. The home. Christopher Battersby is a devout Christian, running his household in strict and obsessive accordance with the Old Testament. When his daughter runs off to London with an unsuitable man, he struggles with his faith and the limits of what he can forgive. NIGHT WATCHES by Allan Monkhouse 1916. The trenches. A new orderly begins work on the night shift at a Red Cross hospital, only to find that two of the patients are more comically surprising and disruptive that originally seemed.

‘Oh, it’s a funny sensation, having money in your pocket, I can tell you... Money warms you. If you knew how warm and safe I feel. Like a new creature in a new skin.’ In a production commissioned by the Finborough Theatre, a unique opportunity to see a classic of Yiddish theatre for the first time in the UK – Treasure by David Pinski. Tille is the poor gravedigger’s daughter, with nothing in the world except a head full of dreams. Things look set to stay that way, until the day her brother returns from the graveyard with a pile of gold coins, and Tille is faced with a choice. She can hand in the money and go back to a life of drudgery, or she can use it to turn the world upside down. As the village community disintegrates into chaos and descends on the cemetery in search of gold, Tille and her family must use all their wits to stay one step ahead of those who want their share of the treasure. A timeless fable that digs down into the depths of our folly and greed and, in the midst of the chaos, celebrates one woman’s ingenuity. Treasure, or Der Oytser, is a comic masterpiece of Yiddish theatre. Written in 1906 and first performed in 1912, it remained popular in the Yiddish repertoire until the 1940s: most notably, Max Reinhardt’s production in Germany in 1919, an English-language version on Broadway in 1920, as well as a production staged in the Vilna Ghetto in 1943.

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate—but never entirely control—the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.

A riveting tale of entrepreneurship, philanthropy, intrigue and betrayal through three generations of an extraordinary Victorian family.