Henry Livings

Henry George Livings (20 September 1929 – 20 February 1998) was an English playwright and screenwriter, who worked extensively in British theatre, radio and television from the 1950s to the 1980s. Starting as an actor, he was inspired by the dramatist Brendan Behan, whom he encountered while a member of the Theatre Workshop company in the mid-1950s, and began writing plays.

As a working-class Northerner he focused on characters from a similar background to his own and paid little attention to the traditional theatrical elements of plot and character development. He showed the English working class in humorous ways while celebrating them in ways that would bring laughter, without overlooking darker images. Believing that theatre audiences could not concentrate on a scene for more than a few minutes, Livings developed a personal technique of play construction: his plays often consist of seven-minute sections strung together, and a coherent continuous narrative dispensed with.

Life and career Early years Livings was born in Prestwich, Lancashire, on 20 September 1929, the son of George Livings (a shop manager) and his wife Dorothy Buckley. He attended Park View Primary School from 1935 to 1939 and the Stand Grammar School from 1940 to 1945, where, according to his fellow dramatist Alan Plater, he enjoyed the learning but developed a lifelong contempt for the associated snobbery and elitism. He won a scholarship to the University of Liverpool, where from 1948 to 1950 he studied French and Spanish. After leaving the university without taking a degree he spent two years (1950 to 1952) doing his compulsory National Service in the Royal Air Force, during which time he served as a cook.

Livings gained experience as an actor in what The Times has described as "the controlled anarchy" of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, which he joined in 1956. He also appeared in supporting roles in television dramas, including T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1957) and Bill Naughton's Starr and Company (1958).

1958–1962: early plays Like several of the Theatre Workshop company, Livings was inspired to try his hand at playwriting, and in 1958 he wrote Jack's Horrible Luck, a loosely knit series of episodes involving a naive young sailor ashore in Liverpool exploring a comic but disturbing underworld of low-lifes. He sold the play to the BBC but it was not produced until August 1961, when Barry Foster and Wilfred Brambell led the cast in a BBC Television broadcast. By that time, another television play by Livings, The Arson Squad, had been transmitted (April 1961) and his first stage play, Stop It, Whoever You Are, had been presented at the Arts Theatre in February of that year with Brambell and Arthur Lowe in the cast.

The Stage expressed reservations about parts of the script of Stop It, Whoever You Are, but found Livings "a writer of originality and promise, not yet able to control his ideas and material with enough precision, clarity and art to make them as effective as they could be, but interesting and entertaining all the same". Livings showed an instinct for dramatic writing and a fair display of craft, the reviewer added, that left him looking forward to the playwright's next work. The anonymous reviewer in The Times remarked that the humour "falls clumsily between sophisticated and unsophisticated". In The Daily Herald, David Nathan wrote, "Trapped halfway between revulsion and laughter, skewered between disgust and admiration, I have to report that the Arts Theatre is showing the most extraordinary play In London". In The Daily Express, Bernard Levin wrote, "there were 20 minutes in the second act during which I laughed so much that I was not merely in pain but feared that I had done myself some serious physical mischief". He concluded by begging his readers to go to see the play – "But don't take the Lord Chamberlain". The piece won for Livings the Evening Standard Award for "most promising playwright".

Among other plays by Livings are Big Soft Nellie (1961), whose witless hero creates chaos in a radio repair shop; and the stage and later television comedy Nil Carborundum (1962), set in an RAF kitchen and drawing on the author's experience of National Service. The stage version of the latter was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), with a cast headed by Nicol Williamson and Graham Crowden. Several critics compared it to a Whitehall farce. Trewin contrasted it with Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything, another play about life for national servicemen in the RAF, premiered within weeks of Livings's play, concluding that "where Livings treated station life farcically, Wesker lashes out in fury … at the general humiliation of a conscript's life". In an adaptation for BBC television in October 1962, Williamson and Crowden recreated their stage roles and the author appeared in a small part. Kelly's Eye, mounted at the Royal Court Theatre in June 1963, was a straightforward drama, which disappointed some critics, including Kenneth Tynan who had hoped for more of Livings's farcical anarchy.

1964–1972: later plays Peter Hall, director of the RSC, commissioned Livings's next play, Eh? which was produced at the company's London base, the Aldwych Theatre, in October 1964. David Warner played the central figure, Valentine Brose, and Donald Sinden played his bemused employer. The play was later staged at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, with Dustin Hoffman, running for 232 performances and bringing Livings to the attention of American audiences. The Times described it as "the high-point of Livings's career as a dramatist".

Scase directed The Little Mrs Foster Show at the Liverpool Playhouse in November 1966 with Barbara New and John Malcolm in the central roles. The author's friend and frequent collaborator Alex Glasgow acted in the production as well as providing the music. The play depicts a European couple caught up in an uprising in an African country. In The Guardian, Benedict Nightingale described the play as the author's "mixture of farce and blood" more extreme than ever ... "his most obviously serious play".

Good Grief, premiered at the Library Theatre in Manchester in July 1967, was described as "a popular evening's entertainment". It featured Livings and Glasgow with Jean Boht and Brian Miller in two one-act plays and three comic sketches. Livings's last full length stage play was The Finest Family in the Land (later retitled The ffinest ffamily in the Land) a straightforwardly comic piece, first given at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln in June 1970 and revived by the Theatre Workshop in 1972. Livings worked with the director Ultz on a translation of Federico García Lorca's play The Public, published in 1994.

Separated from his wife, Livings lived from 1982 with Myra Brenner, a friend from university days.

The academic Steven H. Gale writes that Livings has been variously described as an Absurdist, an Angry Young Man, and a member of the "kitchen sink" school. Gale adds that the plays are:

In Gale's view Livings captures the language patterns of the working class, and shares with his contemporaries Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter "a distrust of the simple, overblown exposition of the well-made play and Shavian comedies".

Plays Source: Encyclopedia of British Humorists.

Stop It, Whoever You Are (1961) Big Soft Nellie (1961) Nil Carborundum (1962) Kelly's Eye (1963) Eh? (1964) The Little Mrs Foster Show (1966) Good Grief (1967) (One-acts and sketches: "After the Last Lamp", "You're Free", "Variable Lengths", "Pie-Eating Contest", "Does It Make Your Cheeks Ache?" and "The Reasons for Flying") Honour and Offer (1968) The Gamecock (1969) Rand (1969) Variable Lengths and Longer: An Hour of Embarrassment (1969) Boggan (1970)

The Rifle Volunteer (1970) Beewine (1970) The ffinest ffamily in the Land (1970) You're Free (1970) Mushrooms and Toadstools (1970) Tiddles (1970) Brainscrew (1971) Cinderella: A Likely Tale (1972; adaptation of Charles Perrault's story) The Tailor's Britches (1973) Jonah (1974) Jug (1975) Shuttlecock (1976)

Notes, references and sources