Happy Jack

Happy Jack is 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.

The play weaves through the story of this ordinary working class family and retells snippets of their lives together, the love, sadness, anger, joy and conflict. 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.

Press for this production

Happy Jack is a delightful piece – a proper “dramedy”. Full marks to Tracey-Ann Wood and Jonny Magnanti for making us truly believe in the two protagonists and to director Dan Armour for allowing the love, humour, joy and sadness of Godber’s writing to shine through. ★★★★ London Theatre 1 

it’s a love letter both to his grandparents who inspired the play and to a world now long gone… Jonny Magnanti and Tracey-Ann Wood make a winning couple – addressing us directly at the beginning and intermittently through the play. We like them and believe in them ★★★★ Broadway World

A wonderful time capsule of a play full of warmth and bittersweet joy, Happy Jack is well worth a look. ★★★★ Fairy Powered Productions

There is much to admire in the play… Jonny Magnanti as Jack is superbly grumpy and wonderfully touching. He navigates terribly well the very fine line between caricature and humanity. Tracy Ann Wood is superb as Liz. Her performance is both touching, funny and truthful. London Pub Theatres 

Happy Jack is about a lifetime of routine, about memories from lives lived in a rut, but written so well and performed so beautifully by Jonny Magnanti and Tracey-Ann Wood that it seemed almost a joyous existence; Happy Jack told of a life that gave The Munroes enough love that it felt like a life to envy. Southwark News