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HENRY LIVINGS

  (1929 - 1998)
Nationality:    English
email:    n/a     Website:    n/a

Literary Agent:    n/a

Henry Livings (20 September 1929  20 February 1998) was an English playwright and screenwriter, who worked extensively in British television and theatre from the 1960s to the 1990s. He was born in Prestwich, Lancashire, but Scotland bit deep into his surreal writing. He referred in correspondence to: ''Delph and Debcross in deep Pennines, where there is pottery and angst, where whippets play in brass bands, and where our better-class neighbours avoid London to live and imbibe in Scotland.'' In 1956, as a ''spear-throwing rather than carrying'' member of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, he met his wife, Judith Frances (Fanny) Carter, in Dundee. He is survived by her and their two children, Toby and Maria. Since 1982 he had lived with a friend from his Liverpool Univer-sity days, Myra Bremmer. She lovingly abetted him through hard-drinking nights and pipe-smoking days that enlivened and asphyxiated lecture and workshop audiences who eventually became friends. He was a prolific writer. Since Stop It Whoever You Are (1961), there have been 32 stage plays and a marvellous sequence of 14 ''scenarios with fictions'' entitled The Pongo Plays (1969-76). These are dramatic sketches, based on Japanese and Kyogan plays, featuring one Sam Pongo - a weaver who questions the didactic certainties of a master. They are killingly funny, and deserve theatrical serialisation. Though his finest plays were written in the sixties - Kelly's Eye (1963), EH? (1964), The Little Mrs Foster Show (1966) - he reached new audiences with idiosyncratic episodes for such TV shows as Juliet Bravo and Bulman. His last publication was ''a rueful and mendacious theatrical memoir'', The Rough Side of the Boards (1994). From its hilarious pages, we learn that falling in love with the female playing Lechery in Dr Faustus in 1952 started ''a life on the boards aimed at the bored''. This social ambition coincided with a brief autobiographical note in Contemporary British Dramatists (1981): ''To me, a show is an opportunity for communal imaginings, actors and audiences together, for which I - alone - provide the material.'' Professionally, Livings attracted great actors and directors. Peter Hall directed the London production of EH?. Nicol Williamson was in Kelly's Eye. The 1966 New York production of EH? featured the then unknown Dustin Hoffman. But it was through small companies and university groups that ''most folk learnt of my Miss Takes''. In 1978, in a dreary and very glum BBC programme about ''language and significance'', he said: ''A pun is necessary, you fools. It is necessary for nonsense, it questions our security in the solidity of words.'' Silver-tongued as ever, he clucked through an early seventies production of this writer's earnest direction of Good Grief in Dublin. He slept through a Nottingham version of his adaptation of Kleist's Jug on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1992, and, most of all, in 1968, he attached himself to a Traverse mis-production of a People's Show, where he defin-itely made spear-throwing at crumpled little people fun. - herald Scotland

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below is a list of Henry Livings's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

        After the Last Lamp         Astounding Adventures Of Tom Thumb, The         Barber Of Seville, The         Beewine         Big Soft Nellie         Boggart, The         Brainscrew         Cinderella: A Likely Tale         Conciliation         Daft Sam         Day Dumfounded Got His Pylon, The         Don't Touch Him, He Might Resent It         Eh?         Ffinest Ffamily In the Land, The         Gamecock, The         Glorious Miles         Good Grief!         Great Camel Rumbles, The, And Groans And Spits         Grup         Honour And Offer         Jack And the Beanstalk         Jonah         Jug         Kelly's Eye         Little Mrs Foster Show, The         Mushrooms And Toadstools         Nil Carborundum         Pie Eating Contest         Pongo Plays 1 - 6         Public, The         Rattel         Reasons For Flying, The         Rent Man, The         Rifle Volunteer, The         Rough Side Of the Boards, The         Six More Pongo Plays Including Two For Children         Stop It, Whoever You Are         Stop the Children's Laughter         Tailor's Britches, The         there's No Room For You Here For A Start         This Is My Dream: the Life And Times Of Josephine Baker         This Jockey Drives Late Nights         Tiddles         Variable Lengths And Longer         Your're Free