On the trail of a forgotten Yorkshire playwright
A treasure trove of lost letters and manuscripts, hidden away for years, is to bring back the work of a forgotten Yorkshire playwright.
David Halliwell, born in Brighouse but dying in exile in Oxfordshire at the age of 69, wrote several TV dramas and a large number of scripts for the stage.
Since his death in 2006 his acclaimed works have been largely forgotten, until a tranche of manuscripts were found in the archives of the University of Leeds library.
It was the treasurer of Grassington Players, Robert Fort, delving into history, who uncovered the original script for a "darkly comic masterpiece" which the group is now bringing to life.
"Halliwell was a great visionary dramatist," said Mr Fort. "Quite a challenging guy, but he was held in high regard by people in theatre in the 1960s and 70s.
"It seems such a shame that here we have a great Yorkshire playwright who has been almost completely forgotten. So that's what we are doing - reviving a David Halliwell play. It's great that we are able to bring it back to life a bit. I would love to take it back to Sheffield, and Huddersfield."
The play, A Rite Kwik Metal Ta-Ta, was written in 1978 and set against a background of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, transposing a little bit of this to Yorkshire. There's the fictional Yorkish Nationalist Party and the Yorkland Liberation Army, campaigning for independence. Many of the themes and ideas, said Mr Fort, are relevant and resonate today.
He had first seen the play at the Crucible in Sheffield in 1979 and it stuck with him for all these years. When the players discussed a new play, he set out to find the script. But it was a journey of discovery that was to take him firstly back to the Crucible, then to Halliwell's agent, and finally to the University of Leeds where his works were held in the archives.
Eventually, as three boxes of uncatalogued material were recovered, Mr Fort was able to copy out the script - line by line - over the course of three full days. Halliwell's sister Elizabeth Antcliffe also donated his archives including letters from contemporaries and celebrities like John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Cleese and Brian Cox.
This rich vein of personal memorabilia, stumbled upon almost by accident, reveals a picture of the man that Halliwell might once have been, and how he was held in regard as "one of the great writers who never happened".
Mr Fort said: "Holding these letters, from people like John Cleese and Alan Ayckbourn, it's just brilliant. There's a wedding invite from Janet Street-Porter, and a card from John Cleese, saying 'here's some fish called Wanda'. It's a lovely history."
Grassington 'royalty' Mark Bamforth is to direct a cast of six for A Rite Kwik Metal Ta-Ta, to be shown at the Devonshire Institute over three days from Thursday, May 9. To book visit ticketsource.co.uk.