HOME

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Paula Wing

"Art is my life whether you like it or not." This pugnacious sentence from his novel A Serious Man is a good introduction to David Storey. Born working class in the north of England, Storey financed his highbrow art school studies by playing the blue collar sport of professional rugby. What he wrote came from his own obsessions and preoccupations: the weight of family and the call to freedom, class rules and gender conflicts, mental anguish and instability. His work distinguishes him as one of the only writers in his native land to have won awards as both novelist and playwright.

He began writing on the long train rides to and from his rugby matches. Feeling like an outsider in both the art and sporting worlds, he was only happy on the train, he later said. Success came first in fiction, with novels that mirrored the growing pains of the post-war generation. Alienated from their roots and their families by higher education and greater opportunity, his conflicted characters could sometimes escape the narrow confines of small town life, but never its stinging legacy. His first published novel, This Sporting Life, inspired by his rugby days, made his name and is still widely admired.

His plays share themes with his fiction but are more focused on emotions: rage, passion, barely suppressed violence, despair. The best of his plays - like Home - are beautifully shaped and instinctively theatrical. Storey himself had only seen a handful of plays when he began writing them but he proved to be something of a savant. Literally. "The only plays that have ever worked," he says, "are when I start with the first line ... and they write themselves." He claims it never took him more than two or three days to write a full-length play.

Storey's best plays are ensemble pieces with rich, nuanced roles for actors. Part of what made Home such a hit when it premiered was that it showcased two great stars of the old school, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson. The two titans were originally baffled by the play. They found its terse exchanges bizarre, they were stymied by its silences and confused by its frequent non-sequiturs. Still, they gradually came to trust Storey and director Lindsay Anderson and the resulting production was a triumph of each man's later career.

As it did with Gielgud and Richardson, this play creeps up on you. Part of the spell it casts is the slow reveal of the where and the how of these characters. It may have been tossed off in a weekend but Home is a penetrating examination of the world Storey perceived around him, and forty years later its tensions and passions still resonate. As director Dominic Dromgoole said, "if posterity is true, it should reveal a giant in David Storey."

Playwright Biography

1933 - In February the Storey family of Wakefield, Yorkshire, bury their younger son, Neville, a loss that will haunt the them for the rest of their lives. On July 13th David is born, joining elder brother Anthony. Their father, who works in a coal mine, later tells his sons, "I've spent half my life making sure none of you went down that pit."

1938 - 1950 - Young David attends Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in his hometown. His ability is noted, he does well. According to his brother, in these school days David plans to be a visual artist and Anthony a writer.

1951 - David decides to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in London, a decision that prompts his father to cut him off financially. David signs on with a professional rugby league (for Leeds) to finance his studies. He earns six pounds per match and spends an inordinate amount of time on trains traveling between London and his games in the north. During the long hours in transit he writes six novels - all of which remain unpublished. Storey later admits that his chief preoccupation on the rugby field is avoiding serious injury.

1956 - He meets and marries Barbara Hamilton, to whom he remains wedded more than fifty years later. They go on to have two daughters and two sons.

1960 - Storey has retired from professional rugby and is working as a supply teacher. As a writer, the rejections are getting to him. One weekend, after a particularly taxing week on the job, he writes a play about a teacher cracking up, just for a change of pace. He submits The Restoration of Arnold Middleton to various theatres. Meanwhile his first published novel, This Sporting Life wins the MacMillan Fiction Award. Storey is so excited by this breakthrough that he writes his next novel in a mere three weeks. Flight into Camden promptly wins the Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

1963 - This Sporting Life becomes a film starring the great Irish actor Richard Harris, himself a former schoolboy rugby player. Lindsay Anderson directs - the beginning of a close collaborative relationship with the playwright. Meanwhile, Storey's controversial third novel Radcliffe wins the Somerset Maugham Prize.

1967 - Nearly 8 years after it was written, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton is produced at the Royal Court Theatre. It earns Storey a share of his first Evening Standard Award for Best Play (Tom Stoppard is the co-winner for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). Anthony Storey publishes a novel about a a rivalry between two brothers.

1969 - David's new play In Celebration is produced by the Royal Court Theatre and directed by his now great friend Lindsay Anderson. The Royal Court embraces Storey, eventually producing nine of his plays. In the same year he writes The Contractor - in a few days. The Guardian calls it "one of the greatest of all modern English plays."

1971 - The writer dashes off (in a mere 72 hours) two versions of a new play called Home. The version that is produced is a huge hit and features two towering knights of the stage: John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. It wins the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. This is Storey's theatrical heyday. He has as many as three plays simultaneously onstage in the West End in this period.

1972 - His novel Pasmore wins the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

1976 - Saville is awarded the Booker Prize for fiction. In this same year the march of prizes and plaudits hits a roadblock: Mother's Day - his final play for the Royal Court as it turns out - is a critically savaged flop.

1980s-90s - Storey's work falls into disfavour. A book of his poems is published in the early 90's and in 1998 he writes A Serious Man, a novel about a writer having a personal crisis. Storey's great friend and interpreter Lindsay Anderson dies in 1994 and Storey hasn't had another new play produced since.

2010 - This Sporting Life celebrates half a century in print. In The Guardian, novelist Caryl Phillips calls it: "a fiercely authentic account of the hypocrisies of British sporting life."

Present - David Storey lives in London with his wife.

Tidbits

• On the first day of shooting for This Sporting Life, a local rugby team had been hired as extras. They waited, bored and sneering, for the star (the great Irish actor Richard Harris) to emerge from the make-up trailer. When he finally arrived, up the field from them, they were mocking: "Look at this flower coming out." Harris clocked their contempt in an instant. After a moment he began to run full speed toward them, going faster and faster as he approached. At some point they realized Harris was going to run right into them, which he eventually did. After that opening gesture of total commitment and disdain for his physical safety, the local players accepted Harris warmly as one of their own.
• The week David Storey won the Booker Prize, his play Mother's Day had a rocky premiere, capped by the worst reviews of his career. The following week he was at a bar with the actors, trying to rally their spirits, when in walked ... a group of the critics who'd so recently savaged him. Storey couldn't resist. He gave them a piece of his mind, which escalated to actual physical violence. The playwright freely admits now that he was an idiot, but he also adds, "I only really hit hard at Michael Billington (the critic for The Guardian)." Billington himself was philosophical. "The surprising thing is that playwrights don't do it more often."
• David Storey's coal miner father came to London during the original run of Home and he met the actor John Gielgud. "The total incomprehension on both sides was almost elemental," Storey says. "The miner who'd been down the pit for 40 years meeting an actor who was supposedly homosexual and effete. They were two human beings who couldn't possibly encounter each other at all in any other circumstances."
• David Storey hasn't had a new play in nearly twenty years. In his seventies now, he says he's drifting back to his early passion for painting.

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Toby Malone

Two English gentlemen, Harry and Jack, meet in a non-descript place, politely greet one another, and begin with the niceties that social custom demands. From this simple beginning, David Storey builds a heart-breaking collection of relationships driven by a desire to belong and maintain human contact.

Storey's under-produced masterpiece premiered at London's Royal Court theatre in 1970, where the roles of Jack and Harry were filled by two of England's most beloved theatrical knights - Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud. The ebullient Richardson contrasted with the ice-cool Gielgud, resulting in a partnership which quickly moved into English theatre legend, and irretrievably associated the work with those two personalities for a generation.

David Storey's playwriting peak came during an era when playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, and Tom Stoppard were redefining the English theatre. There is a distinct allegiance between Storey's playwriting style and that of his contemporaries: staccato phrases, unconscious Englishisms, and an acute awareness of societal decorum. Storey, however, is different to his colleagues in his varied background. A former trumpeter and professional rugby league player, Storey's first novel, This Sporting Life, chronicled his experiences with the sport. Storey later adapted his book into an award-winning film, which earned Richard Harris an Oscar nomination. Throughout his career, Storey split time between drama and fiction, winning acclaim including the 1976 Booker Prize. In Home, Storey uses a keen sense of observation and analysis to craft the brilliantly witty and realistic interchanges between characters which range from benign to outrageous. This is a play that deserves to be placed along the great works of the English renaissance of the 1970s. Beautifully crafted, with equal shares of humour and stark humanity, Storey never allows the audience to stop guessing. Ultimately, David Storey's Home offers a moving, beautiful tribute to disparate figures for whom 'home' is anything from a beautiful fantasy to a concrete here and now.