Henry Livings

• Born: September 20, 1929
• Birthplace: Prestwich, Lancashire, England
• Died: February 20, 1998
• Place of death: Delph?, England

Other Literary Forms

In addition to his plays for the stage, Henry Livings is known for his 1968 screenplay adaptation of Eh?, entitled Work Is a Four-Letter Word, and for his work as a television writer. He also was a prolific writer of television and radio drama, and in the 1980’s he published two short-story collections, Penine Tales (1983) and Flying Eggs and Things: More Penine Tales (1986).

Achievements

Usually clustered uncomfortably with the post-John Osborne playwrights of Great Britain, Henry Livings was perhaps more popular in the regional theaters than in London itself. An actor influenced by Joan Littlewood and her presentational approach to theater, Livings first confounded London audiences with Stop It, Whoever You Are, especially the industrial lavatory scene, the beginning of Livings’s career-long interest in the workingman in situ. Along with successes at the Royal Court Theatre, London, Livings’s plays were successful in Stratford, Manchester, Oxford, Lincoln, Birmingham, and Stoke-on-Trent. This appeal to the less sophisticated audience is what separated Livings from both critical approval and big-name notoriety in London theatrical circles. As for American productions, only the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park showed continuing interest in Livings’s work, having produced Honour and Offer as well as Eh?, his best-known play in the United States, which won a 1966 Obie Award for its production at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre. The value of Livings’s contribution lies in his concentration on the fairly short entertainment segment, appealing directly to the working-class audience of every age, without concessions to more traditional dramatic considerations such as structure and psychological character studies. Combining the vaudevillian lazzi (the stock-in-trade of the British comic actor) with an uncanny insight into the real problems and delights of the British working class, Livings managed to make an evening at the theater the robust, titillating, hugely entertaining experience it was meant to be. His work added humor and linguistic virtuosity to the otherwise sober, even whining, “kitchen sink” school of British drama.

Biography

Born in Prestwich, Lancashire, on September 20, 1929, Henry Livings was not, as might be suspected from his work, reared in a working-class family, but in a white-collar family. Perhaps from visits to his father’s place of work (George Livings was a shop manager), he began to look carefully at the lives of people at work. Livings’s grammar-school years at Park View Primary School (1935-1939) and Stand Grammar School (1940-1945) put him in contact with the lives of his sturdy public-school classmates from Lancashire during the war years. After a brief enrollment (on scholarship) at Liverpool University (1945-1947), where he concentrated on Hispanic studies, Livings served as a cook in the Royal Air Force until 1950, when a series of jobs finally brought him to an acting career with the Century Mobile Theatre, in Leicestershire. Livings’s association with Joan Littlewood’s company at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London, began with a role in Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (pr. 1954). It was Littlewood who encouraged Livings to continue writing, and, having married Fanny Carter, an actress with the company, in 1957, he wrote his first successful play, Stop It, Whoever You Are, produced at the Arts Theatre in London in 1961. Despite the furor it raised, and encouraged by the Evening Standard Award in 1961, Livings wrote busily during the next five years, a period that produced Eh?, The Little Mrs. Foster Show, Kelly’s Eye, and several other plays. His audience, he found, was not in London but in the shires, where a more solidly working-class audience understood the world Livings was creating on stage, the language with which the characters communicated and failed to communicate, and the special defeats and triumphs of their social class. The anti-intellectual bias of Livings’s vision naturally led him to radio and television; he was associated with the British Broadcasting Corporation’s program Northern Drift and wrote several short radio works collected and published under the title Worth a Hearing: A Collection of Radio Plays (1967).

After 1970, Livings worked in shorter forms, writing short sketches centering largely on a picaresque but British working-class Scapin named Pongo. The Pongo plays have been collected in two volumes (1971 and 1974); the latter contains two plays for children, an important part of Livings’s work, Livings finds his voice in the gathering places of the common worker, the lodge halls and Rotary clubs that recognize the veracity of his imagination and comprehend the language and life of his characters. Livings continued to write for the working class and children, with Flying Eggs and Things (1986) and the more serious This Is My Dream: The Life and Times of Josephine Baker (1987).

Analysis

Quite a few of Henry Livings’s plays begin with the entrance of a man at work or just from it, who addresses the audience directly, setting up the first confrontation, either with his environment or with the scabrous social system that put him somehow beneath the station he deserves, if wit and perception were the criteria. Henry Cash, beekeeper and bookkeeper in Honour and Offer, is typical:

Henry (sombre and intense, to us): This is where I contemplate. Later in the day, the bees murmur, and I’m able to contemplate even better.

This kind of opening, which violates traditional rules against addressing the audience directly, typifies the nature of Livings’s relationship with the theater: It is a place where he goes to present himself in various disguises, to discuss in theatrical and humorous ways the dilemma of being in this world and happy at the same time. The signature of Livings’s characters is whatever is opposite passivity, helplessness, anguish, and defeat. What separates the workingman from his pitiable superiors is that he works, while they merely swot at the free enterprise system as it is oddly practiced in England. Stanley, the lisping hero in Big Soft Nellie, defends his entire existence with the simple statement, “I am a man and I do a job.”

The corollary to the dignity of work is the sanctity of the workplace. In Livings’s world, a man’s shop is his castle, and no interfering foreman or supervisor is going to taint it. Livings’s best-known play, Eh?, takes place in the boiler-room of a mammoth dye factory, where someone upstairs shovels coal into the boiler while the hero, Valentine Brose, watches the gauges, at least in theory. Instead, Val commands his fortress like a baron, growing hallucinogenic mushrooms in the moist heat; bedding his new bride in the double bunk; confounding the works manager, the personnel officer, and the local environmentalist with startling vigor. Winning them over with his mushrooms does not save his castle, however, which is destroyed from within by a vigor of its own. “Once upon a time. There was a boiler. Once upon a time,” recites Val as the boiler explodes, making the connection between children’s tales and working-class life that Livings has claimed as his own invention.

For exploding or confounding, the best tool available to Livings’s characters is the language. Just as Federico García Lorca captures the naturally poetic diction of the Spanish peasant and John Millington Synge re-creates the rhythms and cadences inherent in the Western Irish tongue, Livings reproduces the amazing language patterns of the working-class families of Liverpool, Yorkshire, Manchester, and Birmingham. It is a difficult tangle of near-communication, lost threads, subjective references, internal arguments going on underneath the normative conversation, subtexts overpowering the superficially civil correspondences, vague antecedents, and private vocabularies hinting at metaphoric connections long lost to logic. Miraculously, they understand each other—in fact, they are bonded by the commonality of their language, so that an argument shouted in the presence of strangers has all the secrecy of a family code. The reader may wish for more signposts through the labyrinth of utterances that seem to be attacks and ripostes but whose meaning is just out of reach; the signposts are there, but they are obscured by the lush undergrowth of Livings’s imagination. If his characters are rather more loquacious than those of Harold Pinter, David Mamet, or Samuel Beckett, they share the same uneasy distrust of oversimplified exposition.

The comparison with Beckett does not end with the language. Livings finds great resources in the vaudeville skits and sight gags that find their way into Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954). In the opening scene of Livings’s The ffinest ffamily in the Land, Mr. Harris spends a good five minutes at the elevator looking for his key in every possible nook and cranny of his outfit, while his wife and son look on. When Mrs. Harris takes a try, her hand goes through a hole in Mr. Harris’s pocket and her wedding ring gets caught in the hair on his leg. Trapped in this ridiculous position, the Harrises take several elevator rides trying to avoid being seen by their lodger and her male companion. The short sketches collected as the Pongo plays (1971 and 1974) are essentially music-hall skits, featuring such visual tricks as walking in place, miming puddles and other impediments, exaggerated playing at saber and pistols, and mugging reactions. The broad appeal of this kind of humor calls on the talents of the actor, who must do considerably more than memorize his lines in order to bring the theatrical moment to life. Songs often introduce the plays, sung by a “Musician” visible onstage who often takes a small part in the stage business as well, as though the fictive stage intrudes on the real world at every turn. When, in The Boggart, the monster succeeds in scaring Pongo into wrestling with his daughter, the Musician joins in the fun with a song sung in harmony with the Boggart. In Beewine, however, an angry master, foiled in his pursuit of Pongo, takes out his wrath on the Musician, who must flee for his life as the skit ends.

While critics generally acknowledge Livings’s debt to vaudeville and other popular forms, they find fault with his dramatic structure. Plots moving in one direction suddenly shift; pieces of business elaborately constructed are abandoned; characters introduced are left behind. Livings explains that he writes in short bursts, keyed to the attention span he perceives in the theater, and otherwise gives little attention to structure.

Taken together, Livings’s plays constitute something more than just a variation on the “kitchen sink” or “dustbin” drama of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Livings’s distinct contribution is a heartiness in the people dramatized in that era. They are harder-working, prouder, more robust than their counterparts in the hands of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, or John Arden. They are more loving, more open, and more insistent that life give them their share. Also, like Livings himself, they are more content with being themselves and less charmed with the prospect of trying to be something they are not.

Stop It, Whoever You Are

A case in point is his first success, Stop It, Whoever You Are, actually a five-scene vehicle for a series of slapstick routines involving Perkin Warbeck and his attempts at simple survival. The play begins with a harmless flirtation between Warbeck (recently retired) and a buxom fourteen-year-old girl, and ends, after several visits to the factory lavatory, with the explosion of the leaking gas in the Warbeck household, peopled with Warbeck’s ghost and Mrs. Harbuckle, medium extraordinaire, now bald and looking “like Warbeck in drag.” The play resembles a meandering Sunday drive; it steps from point to point, and the sights are worth the trip.

The Little Mrs. Foster Show

More serious in tone and more structurally sound is The Little Mrs. Foster Show, a nightmarish look not only at the decolonialization of Africa but also at the madness of war without zeal. Presented in the format of a touring lecture-with-slides on the adventures of Mrs. Foster’s missionary work in Africa, the play deals with her relationship to a mercenary, Hook, who has been abandoned by his comrade, Orara, after his leg has been injured in a grenade blast. Stumbling on Hook in the jungle, Mrs. Foster submits to his charms but denounces him on their return to civilization, to save her reputation as a maiden. Orara imprisons and tortures Hook, but when an enterprising Mr. Clive convinces Mrs. Foster to take her story on the lecture circuit, they need Hook to help them dramatize those months together. Now sporting an artificial leg (but keeping the original one in a handy package on his lap), Hook joins the show. In an attempt to avoid the smell of the leg, Mrs. Foster splits her dress in half; now exposed, she “abandons the ruined dress and takes her place, brave and breathless, by Hook, to wave to us.” Thus, her earlier modesty and refusal to face her own sensuality, which began Hook’s troubles, now are abandoned in favor of a more honest admission of her complicity in the seduction. For critics who seek thematic consistency and structural integrity in Livings’s work, this play provides a sufficiency of both.

Kelly’s Eye

The Hook-Mrs. Foster seduction contains a kind of vigor that typifies all the romances in Livings’s work, especially those between husband and wife. Women here are demonstrative, even aggressive; they like to be tickled and chased; any sort of terrain will do, whether garden or workshop, and vows must be renewed and reinforced with deeds. Perhaps Livings’s only purely serious full-length play, Kelly’s Eye, is at base a love story. Fleeing the automobile of a young seducer, Anna finds the beach hut of Kelly, fugitive from the law for the murder of his best friend. Responding to their sudden attraction for each other but not wanting to reduce it to a simple sexual one, they agree to sleep apart, with Kelly protecting Anna while she reexamines her values. When Anna’s father, Brierly, a typical Livings antagonist from the world of high finance, tries to return Anna to her country-club life, Kelly takes her away to a small seaside room, giving up his own anonymity and obscurity. A prying landlady and a nosy reporter ruin Kelly and Anna’s substitute “honeymoon” by showing Brierly where they are hidden, and, in one of the most gruesome scenes in Livings’s generally optimistic theater, Kelly swallows disinfectant and dies. Reminiscent of Eugene O’Neill or D. H. Lawrence, the play confused critics who expected the same kind of farce that Livings had produced before, and it did not receive favorable reviews. The starkness of the landscape in which this bizarre but honest love affair grows and the suddenness of the characters’ willingness to expose themselves to one another mark this play as a significant work waiting only to be refound by a sensitive director.

A Theatrical Flair

For the reader, however, the delights of Livings’s plays lie in their humor. This humor is almost always subtle when embedded in the language, but it is broad in the action. There is a kind of tension set up between the obvious, even childish, silliness of the stage business and the droll and obtuse humor of the dialogue, often understated, sardonic, in the ironic mode, and consequently available only to the careful reader. A particular habit of Livings is the elaborate stage direction, not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s: Highly literate prose is inserted into the dialogue not only as a signal to the actor but also as a parenthetical comment by the playwright to the reader. As is always the case with irony, the sense of the line is apparent not necessarily in the words but in the tone, and Livings sees fit to assist the reader or actor in those moments. In a scene of conjugal bliss al fresco, from Honour and Offer, Livings prescribes this stage direction: “Doris shrieks with shocked glee, claps her hand to her mouth, glances toward the bench, and flees on tiptoe. They tiptoe hazardously round the savage beehive, excited as much by the need for silence and the danger of the malignant bees as by the prospect of one catching hold of the other.” This sort of rhetorical insertion is not meant to get in the way of the director’s task but to help the reader grasp the texture of the scene.

Conversely, Livings’s ostensibly prose works contain the same theatrical flair that identifies his stage pieces. His work for the British Broadcasting Corporation, some of which is gathered in the collection entitled Penine Tales, straddles the boundary between prose and drama; their personal style and their obviously autobiographical content render them a sort of continuation of Livings’s dramatic work, but reduced to words without pictures. “Twice-Nightly, Thursday Off to Learn It.” “Fit-Up Touring, Also to Help in Kitchen,” and “Will the Demon King Please Wear the Hat Provided?” all reflect Livings’s early struggles as an actor. Although it is a mistake to take these short radio pieces as pure autobiography, it can be said, as a narrator admits in one of the stories about childhood, “The boy was me.”

The 1986 volume Flying Eggs and Things: More Penine Tales continued in the same vein. The 1987 production of This Is My Dream: The Life and Times of Josephine Baker, however, examined the career of the celebrated expatriate African American singer and actress in more serious fashion.

Bibliography

Goorney, Howard. The Theatre Workshop Story. London: Methuen, 1981. Livings discusses his warm relationship with Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop, where he worked and acted in the mid-1950’s, “after an odd audition during which I was required to scythe hay across the stage.” On his plays, Livings remarks, “I should like to think one play of mine could catch, just once, the rich texture and the tough purpose she displays again and again.”

Hunt, Hugh, Kenneth Richards, and John Russell Taylor. The Revels History of Drama in English, 1880 to the Present Day. Vol. 7. London: Methuen, 1978. Livings took his place in modern drama “by virtue of the power and variety of his output, the striking individuality of his means of dramatic expression, alongside the major figures of the heroic days.” Short but informative overview, from Stop It, Whoever You Are to Honour and Offer.

Rusinko, Susan. British Drama, 1950 to the Present: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Rusinko discusses Livings under the heading “Working Class Writers.” She provides a brief biographical sketch, followed by informative outlines of Stop It, Whoever You Are, Nil Carborundum, and Eh? Discusses words and Livings’s detailed instructions about how certain words are pronounced.

Taylor, John Russell. The Angry Theatre: New British Drama. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. An essential starting place for the study of Livings. Some critics, says Taylor, find his work “both profound and riotously funny [while] others determinedly find it neither.” The important difference, he says, is that not only “does he come from the working class, but he writes principally for the working class.” Good long discussions of several works, including Jack’s Horrible Luck and more popular plays.

Thomson, Peter. “Henry Livings and the Accessible Theatre.” In Western Popular Theatre, edited by David Mayer and Kenneth Richards. London: Methuen, 1977. An appreciation of the common appeal of Livings’s work to the British housewife, “the bawdy mockery of respectable middle-class avarice.” Considers the primacy of language, the convention of direct address, and other aspects of Livings’s craft. Thomson says that Livings is “a man with a lot of plays in him, and hardly anywhere to put them.”