As a passionate lover of football, in particular of Liverpool FC, Ted Whitehead, who has died aged 89, would have readily admitted that his career as a writer was a game of two halves. In the first, under the name EA Whitehead, he was an admired stage dramatist who wrote a number of scorching studies of the sex war for the Royal Court theatre including, in 1972, Alpha Beta starring Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts. In the second half he became a prolific writer of TV drama whose output included adaptations of Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and The Cloning of Joanna May, as well as contributions to long-running series such as Cracker.
While brilliantly acted by Finney and Roberts, Alpha Beta went beyond the study of two trapped individuals to offer a critique of working-class morality, western European monogamy and the restrictive influence of Catholic dogma. Perhaps confirming DH Lawrence’s argument that marriage is more of a duel than a duet, the play showed its lasting power when revived by the Finborough theatre in 2015.
