Henry Livings
Henry George Livings (20 September 1929 – 20 February 1998) was an English playwright and screenwriter, who worked extensively in British theatre, radio and television from the 1950s to the 1980s. Starting as an actor, he was inspired by the dramatist Brendan Behan, whom he encountered while a member of the Theatre Workshop company in the mid-1950s, and began writing plays.
As a working-class Northerner he focused on characters from a similar background to his own and paid little attention to the traditional theatrical elements of plot and character development. He showed the English working class in humorous ways while celebrating them in ways that would bring laughter, without overlooking darker images. Believing that theatre audiences could not concentrate on a scene for more than a few minutes, Livings developed a personal technique of play construction: his plays often consist of seven-minute sections strung together, and a coherent continuous narrative dispensed with.
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