Writer

Born: July 13 1933;

Died: March 27 2017

DAVID Storey, who has died aged 83, was a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and painter; his first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), based on his experiences as a professional rugby league player, also became a notable film, directed by Lindsey Anderson and starring the young Richard Harris.

This Sporting Life made his reputation, in part because as a northern English working-class writer, Storey was associated with the “Angry Young Men”, such as Alan Sillitoe and John Braine, fashionable in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Like most of those to whom the label was attached (they were never anything as homogeneous as a group), Storey disliked the label.

Though he published another successful novel, Flight into Camden, written in three weeks, the same year (which won the Somerset Maugham prize), and was to win the Booker prize in 1976 for Saville, it was the film of his first book that brought him commercial security as well as critical regard. Having got on well with Anderson during the shooting of the film in 1963, he decided to collaborate with the director at the Royal Court Theatre, and turned his attention to drama.

In a remarkable period from July 1967 to November 1971, the Royal Court produced five critical and commercial hits by Storey, none of which, he claimed, had taken him longer than five days to write. The first, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton had originally been written (as To Die With the Philistines) in 1961, but rejected everywhere; revised, it received its first staging at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 1966, and transferred to London the following year. Storey jointly won that year’s award for most promising playwright (with Tom Stoppard, who had just written Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead).

In Celebration (1969) was followed the same year by The Contractor, which drew on Storey’s experience as a teenager working for a firm which erected marquees for weddings; during the course of the play, the actors assembled and took down a tent. Storey was fascinated by the process of watching “12 people who had really nothing in common apart from the fact that they were actors, being unified by work” and realised that “the image of people coming into a room, which was changed by them, and they in turn were changed” was a metaphor not only for theatre, but all kinds of work. Drawing again on his background in rugby, he wrote The Changing Room (1972), about a team before, during and after the match, which won best play in New York after its transfer there.

One of his best-known plays, Home (1971), featured the stellar combination of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as dotty old buffers in a melancholy comedy which, it gradually emerges, is set in a mental hospital. It transferred to Broadway, winning Best Play there too, and Best Actor (jointly) for the stars; it was filmed for the BBC in the Play for Today series.

David Malcolm Storey was born on July 13 1933 in Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father was a miner who was determined his sons should not follow him down the pit; David and his elder brother Anthony were educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. An older brother, Neville, had died just before David’s birth, an event that had a huge emotional impact upon the household.

His father intended that David should progress to university and train as a teacher. He had, however, decided (after reading Verlaine) to become an artist. His father refused to pay for Wakefield Art College, and so David signed a 14-year contract with Leeds to play rugby league to finance his studies.

He held on to the job even after transferring to the Slade (where he was taught by Lucian Freud and Stanley Spencer) in London on a scholarship, travelling back north on a Friday for the weekend match. He began to write on the train. His team-mates thought he was “an arty poof”; his fellow students thought him “a northern oaf”. It was a tension which was to inform much of his work; working-class northerners being introduced to wider artistic horizons, moving to London and feeling uneasy in both places was a theme in Flight into Camden, 1963’s Radcliffe, Pasmore (1972) and the panoramic 500-page Saville.

Eventually, he bought himself out of his contract and in 1956 moved to London to work as a supply teacher while he wrote (he turned out six or seven unpublished novels before This Sporting Life was accepted, which happened only after it won the Macmillan prize for unpublished fiction in America). He and his wife lived in a bedsit near King’s Cross; in spells when he couldn’t get work teaching art, he taught maths – which he had failed in his leaving certificate.

After 1972, Storey’s plays became less fashionable. Cromwell and The Farm (both 1973) and Life Class (1975) fared respectably, but Mother’s Day (1976) was a critical catastrophe – in part because Alun Armstrong forgot his words during the pivotal moment of the play.

Though the best of his work holds up very well – Home and The Changing Room have had several major revivals, and many think This Sporting Life the greatest novel ever written from the perspective of a sportsman – Storey found himself markedly out of vogue by the mid-1980s, and for some time stopped writing.

His later work included the novels Present Times (1984), A Serious Man (1998), as it happened (2002) and Thin-Ice Skater (2004); Storey’s Lives (1992) was a collection of his poetry from 1951-1991. A three-volume collection of his plays, including his later productions The March on Russia and Stages, was published between 1992 and 1998. Towards the end of his life, he returned to painting, and had an exhibition at the Hepworth Gallery last year.

David Storey married in 1956, Barbara Hamilton; she died in 2015; their two sons, Sean and Jake, and two daughters, Helen and Kate, survive him.

ANDREW MCKIE