Preview Billy Liar
A very local play comes to the WYP to celebrate its 50th anniversary
Preview: Billy Liar
Other Recent Preview Articles
Excepting one or two by Alan Bennett, Billy Liar is about as familiar as plays from these parts get. However, it was originally a novel and is perhaps best-known as a film. In 1999 the British Film Institute proclaimed it the country’s 76th best ever, and it forms part of a lineage that brought Bradford the inaugural UNESCO City of Film award last year.
It stars Sir Tom Courtenay, who had understudied for Albert Finney in the play’s original West End production; a couple of decades later the pair would collaborate on another bastion of Bradford’s cinematic heritage, The Dresser.
The novel’s author, and the play and film’s co-author, Keith Waterhouse died last year. However, the West Yorkshire Playhouse seems reluctant to underline this fact prior to its new production, perhaps for fear that doing so might stoke the misconception that it is among the reasons for the company’s decision to produce. Instead, the Playhouse has plumped for a routine ‘50 years since first staged’ standpoint.
Like co-author Willis Hall, Waterhouse was born and raised in Leeds but succeeded in achieving his protagonist Billy Fisher’s goal of fleeing the North for London to find recognition for his writing. Considering that it’s a comedy conceived on the cusp of the 60s, its plot is quite downbeat: as its title indicates, Fisher is an irresponsible fantasist, not a spirited dreamer. He wants to write scripts for the metropolitan hordes, but the tangibles of his life are all dreary and wearying: he lives with his family in the small, fictional West Riding town of Stradhoughton, works as a clerk for a firm of undertakers, and is engaged to two women that he doesn’t fancy but not to the one he does. It belongs to the flock of mucky tales under crowded terrace-tops that fathered soaps, although Fisher’s instinct for flight over fight defies the movement’s mores.
The Playhouse production is to be directed by Nick Bagnall. He is taking the fairly unusual step of making his directorial debut with the company, having served with it as an actor before. His work as a director has spanned much of the country, but a rendition last year of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at the West End’s Trafalgar Studios was probably his highest-profile project to date.
As well as earning considerable status in its own right, the play has bequeathed much to popular culture. For it is thought to have inspired Morrissey to write The Smiths’ tirade against marriage ‘William, it Was Really Nothing’, a theory no doubt grounded in the song’s portrait of a romantic quagmire not dissimilar to Fisher’s: “How can you stay with a fat girl who’ll say / Would you like to marry me? / And if you like you can buy the ring.”
4 September – 2 October, West Yorkshire Playhouse, £16–26 (concs available)
Posted on Thursday 19th August 2010
SW
Sending you to Twitter, hold on... 
