Note 36 — MAID OF FRANCE[35] By HAROLD BRIGHOUSE

Although in this collection, Brighouse is represented by Maid of France, a play with no local Lancashire coloring, first given on July 16, 1917, in London, not Manchester (it was later produced at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York, beginning April 18, 1918), he has up to the present time written seven plays about Lancashire. He has been particularly successful in one-act drama; Lonesome Like, The Price of Coal, and Spring in Bloomsbury have been popular here and in England. B. Iden Payne, who directed productions at the Gaiety Theatre for some time, says: "In all Harold Brighouse's plays there is in the acting more laughter than one would expect from the reading." A number of Brighouse's plays have been published; in the introduction to the latest volume,[36] he writes: "In another age than ours play-books were a favorite, if not the only form of light reading.... The reader mentally producing a play from the book in his hand looks through a magic casement at what he gloriously will instead of through a proscenium arch at the handiwork of a mere human producer." This playwright's attitude toward the reading of plays, with its appeal to the imagination, is one justification for a collection like the present one.