The Guardian (12/Mar/2005) - Obituary: Willis Hall

(c) The Guardian (12/Mar/2005)

Willis Hall

Prolific playwright who drew on his working-class origins

The prolific writer Willis Hall, who has died aged 75, maintained that he could collaborate happily with his friend Keith Waterhouse and others because he didn't need to. It was certainly true that before his collaboration with Waterhouse on the bitter-sweet comedy Billy Liar (1960), he had made his name and fame with his claustrophobic play about British soldiers surrounded in the Malayan jungle, The Long And The Short And The Tall, and that he continued his own individual writing.

More than a dozen childrens' books, including the Vampire series of titles, were, in the 1970s and 1980s, added to Hall's 40 radio and television plays. Described as having a mind you could almost hear ticking, and usually sparing in his conversation, he claimed to maintain regular writing hours from 7am to lunchtime, 365 days a year, and even continued to write soon after a stomach haemorrhage in his 60s nearly killed him.

His rich vein of material owed much to the Leeds working-class background he shared with Waterhouse. They lived 400 yards apart in the Hunslet neighbourhood, where there was a social distinction between those who had a scullery downstairs and those who did not. Peter O'Toole's parents lived in the same area, and sometimes drank with the Waterhouses and the Halls.

Both pupils of Cockburn high school, Leeds, Hall and Waterhouse met at the age of 12. They were members of the same youth clubs, and compared notes about girls. Hall, the son of a fitter in an engineering plant, left school at 14 and ambitiously tried his hand at journalism. He then joined the trawler crews sailing from Hull, and became a professional soldier.

While working as a signals corporal in Malaya, he wrote plays for the schools department of the local radio station. When he returned to Britain after seven years, it was BBC radio for which he continued to work as a playwright, in addition to directing the then unknown John Dexter in a Nottingham YMCA production of Jean Anouilh's Antigone.

Hall had considerable experience as a playwright when Peter Dews asked him to write a stage play for eight Oxford undergraduates he was taking to the 1958 Edinburgh Festival. They were to perform in a hall where the entrances and exits would be restricted for the actors because they would have to carve their way through the audience. A play in which the characters were so cooped up that they did not often have to enter or exit seemed to be a solution, and the resultant play was Disciplines Of War, later renamed The Long And The Short And The Tall.

Hall thought it was less about the clichéd futility of war than about the morality of killing; a sergeant had to decide whether a prisoner should be killed or not, and Hall saw him as the true hero of the play.

After Edinburgh, the Royal Court theatre brought the play to London, where it found favour with the critic Kenneth Tynan. Albert Finney was cast as the north-country troublemaker Bamforth, but got appendicitis; he was replaced by the then unknown O'Toole, who turned the character into a cockney with no loss of plausibility. Robert Shaw was also in the cast and the director was Lindsay Anderson. O'Toole's understudy, who never had to appear, was Michael Caine.

The Long And The Short And The Tall was revived in 1971 at the Shaw Theatre, when a lot of the robust language originally removed by the Lord Chamberlain was patiently restored. His 19 "suggestions" in 1959 had included dropping one character's description of another as a "moon-faced pillock"; other expressions the censor did not like were "And my father's flogging charcoal" and "cook a little pig".

Billy Liar, Hall's first collaboration with Waterhouse, was an illustration of their joint working methods in shows that were to include several musicals. The two men had identical desks, typewriters and filing systems in their West End office. One would shout out an idea for a character, or a line of dialogue, while the other tapped it out. They never subsequently claimed exclusive credit, and never quarrelled.

In 1973, 15 years after Waterhouse's first novel, There Is A Happy Land, had been published, and when both men were working on the book for a musical version of Arnold Bennett's The Card, the routine was much the same. Drinking mineral water, never a favourite of Waterhouse's, Hall sat opposite rather than beside his colleague, talking lines to him as Waterhouse talked other lines back. Neither man attempted to act out the' lines, knowing themselves to be poor actors. When creativity was temporarily at a low ebb, they played cards or Monopoly.

After the success of Billy Liar, Hall collaborated with Waterhouse on Celebration (1961), All Things Bright And Beautiful (1962), Squat Betty and The Sponge Room (1963), Say Who You Are (1965), Whoops A Daisy (1968), Children's Day (1969), Who's Who (1972), Saturday Sunday Monday, an adaptation from the Filippo (1973), Filumena', another adaptation from Filippo (1978) and The Card in 1994. They also cooperated on the script of one of Alfred Hitchcock's least tense films, Torn Curtain (1966).

In collaboration with Denis King, Hall wrote the musical of The Wind In The Willows (1985). The Water Babies, with John Cooper, was produced in 1987, and Peter Pan, with George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, in 1998.

Keenly interested in magic, Hall was a member of many magic circles in Britain and abroad. The president of St Albans football club in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a season ticketholder at Chelsea and Fulham, he collaborated with Michael Parkinson on the book Football Classified (1974), and wrote two of his own, My Sporting Life and Football Final (both 1975).

Hall's marriages were chequered. After moving from Nottingham to London in 1959, he and his first wife Kathleen, whom he married in 1954, were divorced in 1961. The following year, he married the actor Jill Bennett, though they were divorced in 1965. Hall then married Dorothy Kingsmill in 1966. By 1972, they were separated and he was talking about a relationship with the actor Valerie Shute, whom he married in 1973. She and his four sons survive him.