Happy Jack

A funny and touching play about the lives of Jack and Liz. Set in a West Yorkshire mining village, the play is inspired by John Godber’s own grandparents and follows the couple’s 60 year marriage through good times and bad.

Written a year after September in the Rain, we once again meet Liz and Jack, presenting small, lovingly detailed extracts from their lives, from their early courtship days, through to their retirement, but not in chronological order, so we constantly weave a path through their long life together.

Balancing humour with some tougher realities, the play highlights the lives of working miners and the terrible legacies that many of them were left with long after leaving the pits.

Although seen as a sequel to the earlier published September in the Rain, this was in fact Godber's very first play, written when he was 25. It captures life at the coal face, in the pit village, on the donkeys and by the fireside. The play aches with the ups and down of ordinary family life – hilarious and touching, political and angry. Jack and Liz are a working class couple who don’t ask for much, and who are learning to live with what little they have.

Following their performances in September in the Rain for RLT back in September 2022, Shaun Penton and Tracey Parker reprise their roles for this update to Godber's original play.