Henry Livings: A Neglected Voice in the New Drama

HENRY LIVINGS: A NEGLECTED VOICE IN THE NEW DRAMA IN 1958, TWO YEARS AFTER THE "new drama" in England had got underway, Kenneth Tynan lamented the "prim Orwellian sourness" of much left-wing humor, especially in the theater. Since the Restoration , he claimed, the best comic plays were written for, and usually by, Tories. Despite the vitality of the post-Osborne English theater, Tynan still felt that the movement lacked a comic playwright of major importance: We are still deficient in plays that are socially critical at the same time as they are uproariously funny. We miss the sound of responsible gaiety. And we could do with more of those detonating farces that are written by anarchists, who are usually Socialists driven to drink by the anti-fun bias of English Socialism.1 The arrival of Henry Livings on the theatrical scene seems to have filled the very need Tynan was speaking of, though to be sure, the "anarchy" of Livings' earlier plays got rather the better of him. A relative newcomer in the English theatre, Livings' first produced play, Stop It, Whoever You Are, was not performed until 1961. Even by the mid-sixties, however, Livings was still neglected by most criticS'.2 John Russell Taylor's survey, Anger and After,3 devotes a section to Livings, but Taylor's discussion, though comprehensive in scope,4 is necessarily brief and superficial in treatment. Furthermore, 1 "Theatre and Living" in Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (New York, 1958), p. 102. 2 Thus far, only one article on Livings has appeared: John Russell Taylor, "Parables in Farce," Encore, 9 (May-June, 1962), 33-38. Taylor's article deals principally with two unpublished plays, Arson Squad and Jack's Horrible Luck, and Livings' first produced work, Stop It, Whoever You Are. 3 Baltimore, 1963. The section devoted to Livings runs from page 258 to 271. 4 Taylor's discussion includes several unpublished TV scripts. In all, he mentions eleven plays, in addition to Kelly's Eye. The TV scripts (not all produced) include: Jack's Horrible Luck, The Arson Squad, The Rise and Fall of a Nignog, Jim All Alone, There's No Room For You Here For a Start, and A Right Crusader. In addition, Livings has written a half-hour radio script, After the Last Lamp, and several stage plays which have found some kind of production: Stop It, Whoever You Are, The Quick and the Dead Quick, Big SOft Nellie, Nil Caborundum, and of course, Kelly's Eye and EM Two of Livings' plays are reprinted in Penguin's New English Dramatists series: Stop It, Whoever You Are in Vol. 5, and Nil Caborundum in Vol. 6. Three plays, Kelly's Eye, Big SOft Nellie, and There's No Room For You Here For a Start are included in Kelly's Eye and Other Plays (New York, 1964). 38 1969 A NEGLECTED VOICE IN THE NEW DRAMA 39 it was written before the production and publication of Livings' masterpiece , Ek? Like many of the new English dramatists, Livings draws heavily on his working-class background, and in his own fashion, he is as militant a champion of working-class values as Arnold Wesker and the early John Osborne. Indeed, it is due to some extent to the plays of Livings that terms like "kitchen-sink" and "chamber-pot" (he has featured variants of both in his works) have come to be used in describing the English drama of the last decade. Unlike most of his theatrical contemporaries, however, Livings has written primarily for the working classes. His earliest successes were in television-a medium still considered somewhat suspect even in England, where the TV fare is generally superior to ours. Another possible cause of Livings ' critical neglect involves the unwillingness of many commentators to take him seriously: in the eyes of many, he is an "entertainer," not an "artist." Most of his plays incorporate the imagery of popular culture, a practice common to most of the new dramatists. Unlike them, however, Livings does not "transform," satirize, or dignify this imagery. Nor does he seem apologetic for employing traditionally "low" comic devices: stereotyped characters, implausible situations, corny workingclass humor. Indeed, Livings...