The Changing Room by David Storey

First published: 1972

First produced: 1971, at the Royal Court Theatre, London

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Northern England

Principal Characters:

• Harry, an elderly cleaner
• Fielding, an established professional rugby player
• Walsh, the team’s comedian
• Kendal, another player
• Sir Frederick Thornton, the rugby club chairman
• Luke, the team masseur

The Play

David Storey’s play is set in the changing room of a Rugby League club somewhere in the North of England in the later 1960’s. All the twenty-two characters in the play are male, and all are connected with the game of rugby. Thirteen of them constitute the team, two are reserves, and the rest are trainers, masseurs, or club officials of varying status. It is accordingly important to understand some basic facts about the game of Rugby League—facts that Storey, writing for an English audience, could afford to leave unsaid.

Rugby, like American football, is a professional game in that the players are paid. Unlike American football, though, the players are not paid much. The game is rigorously localized, with a small, by no means wealthy, base of support, and the characters are almost all working-class in origin. Rugby, moreover, is a violent contact sport, with an ethic of male hardness, if not brutality. Players wear little padding, accidents and injuries are common, and substitutions (in Storey’s time) were used only in cases of incapacitating injury.

In the play, all these facts are left unstated, but they mark much of the overt and covert action. In the first act, the players are getting ready for the game. They do so with—by American standards—curious unconcern, joking continually, deriding their captain, and appearing to show far more interest in their running conversations than in what is going to start in a few minutes. The challenge for the audience is to “decode” their chatter to see if it can be interpreted to mean something more than appears on the surface. The subjects of this initial conversation are, in fact, extremely various. Harry, the cleaner, a lazy, stupid, elderly man, is convinced that the cold weather has been created by the Russians, who are going to freeze the sea and invade in special boots. The players all treat this theory with derision. They are more interested in horseracing, the cigar Walsh is trying to smoke in defiance of the team trainer, the electric tool kit that Kendal has bought, the various aches and pains they have from last week’s game, and other trivialities. Probably most members of the audience are left, at the end of this act, as the players run out of the room onto the field, wondering what the point of the play will be.

Act 2 takes place just before, during, and just after the halftime interval. It is dominated by Sir Frederick Thornton, not a player but the Club Chairman, a wealthy local businessman. In spite of his wealth and status, he appears quite happy to talk on a level of apparent equality even to Harry, though there is a certain byplay between him and Mackendrick, the Club Secretary, an accountant junior to Thornton in status both inside and outside the club but much more inclined to emphasize his (doubtful) authority over Harry and the players. Thornton seems to want to be an “insider.” The team masseur, Luke, remarks that he has been seen sitting in the stands alone as late as ten at night. Mackendrick, by contrast, sees the team as a business, or perhaps as an exercise in public relations. He (like Harry) has no interest in football. This byplay between the nonplayers is contrasted with the technical discussion of the game among the players at halftime, with the appearance of Kendal with a broken nose just after the game restarts, and with radio commentary heard on two occasions near the end of the act. The team is pulling back from a losing position, and the game is now tied.

The game is over at the start of act 3, and the players, now familiar to the audience, have won it. They resume their conversation in good humor and without the sense of tension apparent before the game; to make matters even better, Walsh has won a lucky bet on the horses. Moore, the reserve and substitute sent on after Kendal was taken to the hospital, has enjoyed his exposure to publicity. The players are leaving to meet wives and girlfriends. However, there is a sense of something less than well-being. To some extent this feeling results from the fact that questions are left unresolved. Will the team accept Thornton as a man like themselves? Will Kendal get his place back on the team? How long can some of the older players continue? The audience is now able to formulate for itself these questions which the team has approached only indirectly. It is the unspoken questions which make the final mood of the play a somber one.

Dramatic Devices

A major device in the play is its use of local accent, or dialect. The characters, all evidently Yorkshiremen, use the archaic “thou, thee, thy” forms for “you,” as is still common in the area. They use the word “lake” for “play,” “ought” for “anything,” “nowt” for “nothing.” It is, then, striking when one of the players imitates Patsy’s girlfriend’s non-northern accent in a parody of high-class speech. Other distinctive voices are those of the radio commentator—detached, amused, nonparticipatory—and of Mackendrick. In counterpoint to them comes the wordless roaring of the crowd, the urban masses whose culture the players represent. Figures of “alienness” and of authority include the referee, dressed in his distinctively different uniform and representing a law-abiding ethic which the players, intent on mayhem, conspicuously ignore. The players’ own uniforms are meanwhile a major prop, indicating team solidarity and suppression of individuality. They are carefully donned during act 1 (which ends with the players running out in numerical order from One to Thirteen), worn throughout act 2, and shed during act 3.

Further indicators of the game world, with its artificial unity and temporary forgetting of differences, include a series of quasi-technical rituals, on which Storey (a former professional rugby player himself) is an authority: forming a scrum, or scrimmage, passing the ball down the line of backs, being inspected for dangerous rings, studs, or buckles by the referee, rubbing hands on the resin-board, inhaling ammonia, running out in team order—broken only by the captain (Number Six, the stand-off half, or “quarterback”), who runs out first. Against these stands an equally powerful set of rituals establishing the nongame world: Walsh urinating in the bath, violent horseplay with buckets and hoses, obsessive joking over genitals, a practical joke exploiting Walsh’s illiteracy. It is ironic that the game world is in its way a serious one, while the nongame world is continually comic. Outside both, though, lies the real world, never present in the changing room itself but repeatedly threatening to invade the characters’ consciousness.

The Changing Room is a play of casual conversation, with few revelations or surprises. “Locker rooms,” to use the American term, are probably like that all the time. However, even in the most realistic conversations, more is usually meant than is actually said. Storey is a master of the art of making words seem at once casual and significant, joking and serious, full of machismo and deeply anxious.

Critical Context

David Storey is well known as a novelist as well as a playwright. He is often considered one of the “Yorkshire writers,” determinedly alien in culture and general attitude to the London-based world of the arts and publishing. Although it is common for authors to work at part-time jobs until they are established, few, if any, have supported themselves, as Storey did for several years, by playing professional league football for Leeds (one of the four or five major clubs in the United Kingdom). Storey has acted as explicator for the traditional, male, working-class ethic of the coal towns of northern England. The Changing Room—the winner of the 1971 New York Drama Critics Circle Award—continues a theme begun in Storey’s first published novel, This Sporting Life (1960). It also deals with a theme broached in that novel and continued in work after work: the power and menace of the female sex. On the surface, women are dominated and despised by the toughly male characters of Storey’s England, but in reality they act almost as vampires—drainers of their partners’ confidence and vitality. The theme is powerfully expressed in Storey’s much later novel A Prodigal Child (1982), in which the central character, Mrs. Corrigan, is also “a Korrigan,” a witchlike figure of Celtic myth.

As a dramatist, Storey is noted for his combination of comedy and tragedy, of realistic surface and symbolic suggestion. His plays are often set in some bare or neutral location such as a changing room. Home (pr., pb. 1970), for example, must take place in some form of mental institution—though the author claims that he did not know this when he started writing the dialogue—while the action of The Contractor (pr. 1969, pb. 1970) occurs during the construction of a temporary marquee (a large tent for an outdoor event). Like the stage sets, the characters are often in transition, doing things of no particular importance, revealing themselves only by accident. However, they often articulate deep fears and unspoken anxieties. To many, Storey has seemed less a realistic than an obsessive and—for all his physical confidence—a tormented writer. It is often alleged that in Anglo-American culture, “real men” are not allowed to show their feelings. Storey’s characters often confirm this view; the author himself rebuts it.

Sources for Further Study

Bygrave, M. “David Storey: Novelist or Playwright?” Theatre Quarterly 1 (April-June, 1971): 31-36.

Free, William J. “The Ironic Anger of David Storey.” Modern Drama 16 (December, 1973): 307-316.

Hutchings, William. David Storey: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992.

Hutchings, William. The Plays of David Storey: A Thematic Study. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Liebman, Herbert. The Dramatic Art of David Storey: The Journey of a Playwright. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Taylor, John Russell. David Storey. Harlow, England: Longman Group, 1974.

Taylor, John Russell. The Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1971.

Worth, Katharine J. Revolutions in Modern English Drama. London: Bell, 1972.