Willis Hall

• Born: April 6, 1929
• Birthplace: Leeds, Yorkshire, England
• Died: March 7, 2005
• Place of death: Ghyll Mews, Ilkley, England

Other Literary Forms

Willis Hall has become familiar to English audiences through a variety of media and genres. He and Keith Waterhouse, with whom he regularly collaborates, are highly regarded for their screenplays. Some of their more notable efforts are Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Billy Liar (1963). With Wolf Mankowitz, Hall has adapted for the screen The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961). Hall has also worked extensively in television, writing for programs such as The Fuzz and Secret Army, coauthoring a half dozen other series with Waterhouse, and writing a number of television plays, often for children. Hall has written musicals (England, Our England, with music by Dudley Moore, was reviewed with great praise), books on sports, the text for a documentary, pantomimes, novels, award-winning adaptations of foreign drama, and scripts for television series. The sheer bulk of Hall’s work and its rich variety testify to his artistic strength and durability.

Achievements

It is difficult to find any single descriptive category or term under which Willis Hall’s achievements as a dramatist will fit with accuracy. The Long and the Short and the Tall (commissioned by the Oxford Theatre Group for the Edinburgh Festival of 1958, and winner of the Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Play in 1959), associated him with the new drama appearing in the wake of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956), and comparisons have often been made between Hall’s Private Bamforth and Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. At the same time, Hall’s early collaborations with Keith Waterhouse have been considered in terms of regional realism as authentic representations of life in the North of England. Plays such as Billy Liar and Celebration reflect their authors’ feel for the idiosyncrasies of regional language, serving as reminders that Hall and Waterhouse often draw with success on their shared Yorkshire background. These descriptions are somewhat helpful; yet with plays such as The Sponge Room or Squat Betty they plainly break down, since these are expressly nonrealistic plays. Such descriptions also do not apply well to later plays, such as Say Who You Are and Who’s Who, which move away from realistic Northern themes and introduce elements of farce.

If Hall’s work resists any single-phrase summary, this in itself is perhaps an indication of his achievement as a writer. He has directed his efforts toward a wide variety of literary ventures in a variety of genres, each demanding its own kind of discipline, and he has performed with some success in all of them. Further, his writings with Waterhouse represent the foremost dramatic collaboration in twentieth-century England, and both are admired for their professional competence and consistency. In addition to their own work, they have created successful adaptations of two plays by Eduardo De Filippo, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, and Filumena, which enjoyed a two-year run in England. On his own, Hall has written and staged a successful adaptation of François Billetdoux’s Chin-Chin (pr. 1960). Hall, then, has written on his own and in collaboration, for children and adults, for the stage and for the radio and screen.

While praising Hall’s versatility and the range of his work, reviewers and critics have at times questioned its depth, and indeed it is difficult to avoid feeling that some of the plays are too light or are perhaps dominated by an adept dramatic technique that masks other and more profound limitations. One might say simply that the aims of the plays are sometimes modest but that they achieve those aims with delightful flair and insight and offer genuine rewards for their readers.

Biography

Willis Hall was born on April 6, 1929, in Leeds, England, the son of Walter and Gladys Hall, and was educated in Leeds at Cockburn High School. As a youth, he became friends with Keith Waterhouse, with whom he worked on a youth-club magazine and collaborated on a wide variety of projects for the stage, television, film, and radio. That friendship was interrupted in 1947 by Hall’s five-year stint in the British Regular Army, during which time he served in the Far East as a radio playwright for Forces Radio. The military provided the background for Hall’s first major stage success after his return to England, The Long and the Short and the Tall, which included Peter O’Toole and Robert Shaw in the cast. Hall resumed his friendship with Waterhouse, and together they adapted Waterhouse’s novel Billy Liar for the stage in 1960, a highly successful production that established Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, each of whom had a turn at the title role, as exceptionally gifted actors.

From that time on, Hall has occupied himself with a remarkably prolific and consistent literary life. With more than two dozen stage plays to his credit, some written with Waterhouse, Hall has successfully experimented in additional commercial forms. In addition to an active career writing and adapting for television, Hall has contributed The A to Z of Soccer (1970, with Michael Parkinson), the first of several soccer books in the 1970’s. He has written much high-quality children’s literature, including Spooky Rhymes (1987), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hollins (1988), Henry Hollins and the Dinosaur (1988), and The Vampire’s Holiday (1991). He is an avid amateur magician and a member of several magic societies.

Analysis

Many of Willis Hall’s plays (including those he coauthored with Keith Waterhouse ) concern the discrepancy between the real world and the world that people invent for themselves. Again and again one comes on figures who have created their own drama about the world and their own part in it, only to find that reality is an entirely different drama that proceeds indifferent to its characters. This theme lends itself to a variety of treatments. In a play such as Billy Liar, it can create a pathetic character whose imagination defends him from the world and masks his lack of courage, and who, when he sees beyond the veil of his own private fictions, knows that he is alone and insignificant. It can also produce the lighthearted farce of a play such as Who’s Who, in which the distortions of reality create a complex series of mixups and mistaken identities culminating in comic disclosures, admissions, embarrassments, and reconciliations. In many of the plays, the imagination is a kind of obstacle to a character’s growth, for it substitutes the satisfying (and effortless) vision of distant success and security for any real development.

The Long and the Short and the Tall

The Long and the Short and the Tall, Hall’s first major success, is a realistic war drama about a small unit of British soldiers in the Malayan jungle, set during the Japanese advance on Singapore in 1942. It seems at first to have little to do with the themes or subjects of Hall’s subsequent work, but much of the play’s conflict grows out of the soldiers’ storybook ideas about war, their visions of themselves as heroic and moral men defending the side of good—visions that are denied by the reality of the war as it quickly closes in on them. This theme is suggested in an early scene. As the men rest in a deserted store-hut in which nearly all the action takes place, Private Evans sits reading the serial story in an issue of Ladies Companion and Home (his mother sends it to him each week), a romantic tale about a second lieutenant who must leave his girl behind when he is posted overseas. The story takes its hero through a variety of exciting and fantastic adventures, the last installment having left him in the hands of some Bedouins who have bound and suspended him above a roaring fire. Evans is puzzled, though, because the current issue finds the hero inexplicably escaped from the Bedouins and enjoying a honeymoon in Brighton with the girl he had left behind, who has waited faithfully for him. The events of the play contradict everything about this kind of story. The petulant Private Bamforth quickly questions the fidelity of Evans’s own girl, taunting him with the suggestion that by now she has probably found a variety of substitutes for him. Bamforth also rejects the heroic ideal of the magazine story by describing his plans for a fast exit in the event of a Japanese invasion. Often, Bamforth’s remarks have a disturbing edge of reality to them that deflates the Ladies Companion and Home image of war, and this is one reason that he is often at odds with his comrades, who still cling to that image. At the play’s conclusion, that image is finally destroyed. Far from effecting any miraculous escape, the men are surrounded by the Japanese and killed, except for Corporal Johnstone, who is wounded and surrenders.

The romantic view of the war is attacked in the second act of the play by Sergeant Mitchem, in his speech on women. The context of that speech is important. The unit has captured a Japanese soldier, separated from his patrol, who has wandered into the hut, and in the initial struggle several of the men find that they are unable to kill the soldier when called on to do so, largely because they realize for the first time that war involves killing men very much like themselves. “He’s human at least,” Private Macleish later explains to Mitchem after the captured soldier has shown them a picture of his family. For Mitchem, however, the point is obvious: “What do you want for your money? Dracula?” He is annoyed by the naïve assumptions about war that the men have brought with them to battle, and he lays the blame on “bints,” on women, who give a man a heroic image of himself in uniform as he heads gallantly off to war. “Few weeks after that,” Mitchem concludes, “he’s on his back with his feet in the air and a hole as big as your fist in his belly. And he’s nothing.” This remark might just as easily have come from Bamforth’s mouth, for he shares with Mitchem an unflinching sense of the truth that lies covered by the men’s self-deceiving fictions.

The Long and the Short and the Tall examines the nature of war, the ways in which it changes the moral relations between men, the almost unbearable demands that it makes on the human conscience. Hall demonstrated, in this play, his skill with dialogue and pace; he also demonstrated a subtlety in his handling of theme that often goes overlooked. At its heart, the play is a study of the fundamental human tendency to believe and act according to the stories we tell ourselves about life and the problems that arise when these stories are contradicted by the sometimes harsh facts of the world.

Billy Liar

In Billy Fisher, the main character of Billy Liar, this storytelling tendency is taken to an extreme. Billy is a conscious fabricator who deceives his family, his friends, his employers, and perhaps most of all himself, for reasons so obscure that one is tempted to agree with his friend Arthur in saying that Billy’s condition is pathological.

Billy Liar is set in the industrial North of England, and the play’s action describes the affairs of the Fishers, a lower-middle-class household whose father, Geoffrey Fisher, has recently lifted his family above his own working-class background through his success as a garage owner. The father is plainly expecting something of the same initiative from Billy, his nineteen-year-old son, but as one meets him in the opening moments of the play, he seems an unlikely successor to his father. He has risen late from bed and comes downstairs in his pajamas and an old raincoat. Billy is also pressured by his mother, Alice, and by her mother, Florence Boothroyd, who is living in the Fisher household and who habitually directs her remarks to the sideboard. The house is decorated in poor taste, and this contributes to the tense and oppressive atmosphere in which Billy is almost constantly derided by his father for being lazy and also for mismanaging his affairs. In some sense, it is understandable that Billy retreats into the worlds created by his imagination.

Billy is in a bad position from the very start of the play. His job with Shadrack and Duxbury, Funeral Furnishers, is in jeopardy because he has been absent on days when he was supposed to have been at work (including the day on which the play takes place). He has also apparently been taking money from the firm and has failed to mail the company’s Christmas calendars as requested. The calendars are crammed into a cupboard that Billy uses for his “private” things, but which he opens for Arthur when Arthur asks him about the calendars. In the cupboard, also, is a letter from Alice Fisher to the host of a radio show called “Housewives’ Choice,” asking him to play an old favorite for her. She concludes the letter with a postscript saying that her son also writes songs but that he probably will amount to little in that line because he lacks the training. She ends with a remark about the family being just “ordinary folk,” and on reading this Billy abruptly tosses the letter back into the cupboard, denying the limitations his mother seems to be putting on his abilities. One senses in this scene that Billy’s stories and fantasies are part of an effort to escape from the mediocrity of his life, an attempt to be something more than ordinary. One soon discovers, however, that he lacks the courage to make any significant break with his environment and that his only escape is to change his world by inventing it anew in his own mind. When Billy threatens to make some practical effort to change his life by quitting his job, Arthur recognizes the characteristic bravado that masks a deeper fear of change and he scoffs at Billy’s threat by saying that he has heard it before.

At first, Billy’s fictions strike one as wonderfully absurd, as flashes of life in a generally dull existence. He has apparently told his parents and others that his friend Arthur’s mother is pregnant—a lie—and this story has gotten back to her. When Arthur’s mother threatens to come and see Mr. Fisher about it, Billy complains to Arthur that she cannot do that, because Billy has since told his parents that she has had a miscarriage to prevent his own mother from delivering a present for the baby. This is good fun, but it suggests other more serious problems that will confront Billy later. Often his stories have significant effects on people around him, and his insensitivity to the problems he may be causing for others reveals a certain self-centeredness.

Billy also seems unaware of the problems he may be causing for himself when the real world breaks through his artifice. His stories have a way of turning on him, as, for example, in his relationships with women. He is expecting a visit in the afternoon from Barbara, a girl to whom he is supposedly engaged and whom he plans to try to seduce by dropping some “passion pills” in her drink. He also needs to convince her to return her engagement ring to him for a time because he needs it to give to another girl—Rita—to whom he is also engaged. The plan backfires when the passion pills prove worthless and Barbara refuses to give up the ring. When Rita suddenly appears at the Fishers’ door demanding her engagement ring, there is an angry and embarrassing exchange among the saucy Rita, Barbara, and the astonished Mrs. Fisher. In this scene, Billy has lost control over events that his lies have set in motion. He is clearly to blame for the situation, and any comic element in it is overshadowed by his apparent indifference to the feelings of others and his inability to foresee the consequences of his actions.

Billy nevertheless wins a measure of sympathy in the play’s conclusion, where we see him as a frustrated dreamer whose imagination is marvelously agile but who is unable to get beyond that agility to the more profound courage required by genuine growth and maturity. In the third act, he meets an old girlfriend, Liz, a much more levelheaded and insightful girl than the others, and with her Billy at least approaches self-recognition. By this time, his deceptions have landed him in a complicated mess that even involves a physical threat from Rita’s brother, and Billy for the first time seems to sense that he has only himself to blame. His fantasies become visions of self-extinction, and he imagines going to London with Liz to lose himself, to become “invisible.” Liz plainly shares his feelings, and they arrange to meet at the train station at midnight to run off to London. The vision, however, succumbs to reality, and the play closes with Billy’s silent return to the house after his parents are in bed. Just why he cannot bring himself to go is left to the audience’s judgment. Billy may realize that a life of invisibility is as much a lie as is the life that he is living now, or it may be that he is lured back by the prospect of manipulating the world in the hope that someday it may match his own desires. In any case, the fertility of his imagination is inextricably tied to his frustrations and his lack of growth, and the play’s ending leaves little hope for any immediate change in his life. The last line of the play, appropriately, is Rita’s, shouting from outside the Fisher house that she will be back in the morning for her ring, her angry voice an emblem of the world outside Billy’s imagination, demanding satisfaction.

Last Day in Dreamland

Last Day in Dreamland is a shorter and less ambitious play than Billy Liar, but it illustrates how deftly Hall can establish atmosphere and mood and how, even in a short play, his attention to language can give solidity to a half dozen different characters. The play is related to Billy Liar in dealing with characters who seem trapped in an unsatisfying way of life, powerless to take the actions that might create some real change.

Like Billy Liar, too, Last Day in Dreamland is set in the North, but in a seaside town. It centers on the owner and operators of an amusement arcade during what turns out to be the last day of the season, though none of them knows this at the start. Still, they know that the end of the season is very near and that they will soon be out of work again until the next season comes around, and it is this atmosphere of melancholy anticipation that hangs over the action throughout, ironically heightened by the backdrop of festivity.

The play begins with a strong sense of pattern and repetition, a strong sense that each of these characters has been at his job for countless years, for they move about with a clear understanding of both their own responsibilities on the job and their relationships to the other workers. In his production notes to the play, Hall emphasizes its “group construction” and the importance of each actor’s studying the parts of the others, because the mood of the action depends on a complete familiarity among the characters and on their displaying the sense that they have done all of this hundreds of times before. Tich Curtis’s question about whether today is their last day is met with affectionate scorn by the manager and mechanic, Coppin, who has heard the same question for fourteen years from Curtis when the season comes to an end. Though he is young, George Fentrill is already noted by the others for claiming that each year at the arcade is his last, and each year Sailor Beeson seems to come closer to losing his job because of his tardiness. The repetition, the sameness, helps to give these figures identity, yet it is an identity that each of them might willingly forsake for a different life.

Coppin’s history is representative of that of the others. One of the younger members of the crew, Harry Lomax, announces that he plans to leave and try his hand at lorry driving after this season, and Coppin responds by recalling his own youthful dreams. He had, he says, planned to open his own shop, repairing wirelesses, but like the others, Coppin’s dream simply slipped away. “So what happened?” Lomax asks, and Coppin’s response gives one some insight into his sympathies with the men who work under him:

Nothing. That’s all—nothing. For years I talked about having that shop—the summers I’ve spent in here dreaming about that joint don’t bear thinking about. So one day, before you know where you are, you’re fifty-two and all you’ve got is a screwdriver, a fistful of loose change and six months’ work a year.

In some ways, the speech recalls Sergeant Mitchem’s in The Long and the Short and the Tall, because it breaks through the haze of dreams and fantasies to a level of reality that few of the characters are willing to face. In the end, Coppin’s description of his own life proves to be true for the others; both Lomax and Fentrill hedge their plans to get away at the end of the season, and the audience is left with a strong sense—as in Billy Liar—that despite the dreams of the characters, a new season at the arcade will find all of them there, lacking the will to escape.

The Sponge Room

In other plays, Hall has allowed his form to echo these themes, so that while their characters avoid reality by arranging their own worlds of fantasy, the works become less realistic. This is true of plays such as The Sponge Room and Who’s Who, which, as Hall and Waterhouse observe in their production notes, depend on a “mood of suspended disbelief in which the audience will be ready to go along with the incongruities of the plot while at the same time appreciating the basic truths about loneliness, fear and fantasy.” The Sponge Room in particular puts the audience in a situation somewhat analogous to that of the characters: The young “lovers” are also suspending their disbelief by pretending to plan an intimate rendezvous, though neither really wants to carry it out. “The play is about three dreamers,” say the authors, “who will never have the courage to carry out their dreams—for the dreams themselves are a substitute for courage.”

Who’s Who

The later farce, Who’s Who, is another example of this nonrealistic treatment. The play’s two acts are divided by a discussion between the two actors playing Bernard White and Timothy Black in which they agree to reenact the events of the first act with some important changes in the scenario. In some ways, the play represents a comic flip side to Billy Liar in that Black, like Billy, runs his life on deception, but without the kind of consequences suffered by Billy. It is a highly stylized, artificial play, but, as in The Sponge Room, the technique seems curiously appropriate here, applied as it is to a work about that fundamental human drive to orchestrate the events of one’s life and re-create a world according to one’s desires.

The Sponge Room and Who’s Who demonstrate the diversity of Hall’s talents, and his longevity and consistency as a writer must in some degree be attributed to his skill for finding new and varied methods of handling his subjects. Though they depart from the earlier, more conventional techniques, they share with Hall’s other plays the insight and feeling that make his art worth experiencing. It is an art full of sympathy for its characters, perhaps because Hall sees in the human urge to dream, to fantasize, to imagine a world and to believe in it, an impulse very much like the dramatist’s.

Bibliography

Martin, Mick. “Timeless Appeal.” Review of Billy Liar, by Willis Hall. The Times Educational Supplement, September 18, 1992, p. SS15. This review examines the National Theatre’s Mobile production of Hall’s Billy Liar and touches on the play’s relevance for the contemporary world.

Matlaw, Myron. Modern World Drama. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972. Although Hall has written a large number of plays, screenplays, teleplays, and children’s books, little has been published about him and his work. This short entry mentions some of his plays and the influence of John Osborne on his work, and briefly traces his switch to light comedy.