The play tells the story of Arthur Parker, a sheet- music salesman in 1930s Britain who is frustrated by his frigid wife, Joan, and by the deafness of the shop-keepers to the beauty of the songs he sells. Although, as Potter has recalled, Arthur is “an adulterer, and a liar and was weak and cowardly and dishonest . . . he really wanted the world to be like the songs” (see Potter, 1993). When he falls in love with a young schoolteacher named Eileen, Arthur connects the beauty of the songs with his sexual longings. When she becomes pregnant, she has to abandon her schoolteaching career and flee to London, where she takes up prostitution to earn a living. After making contact with Arthur once more, she abandons her pimp, Arthur abandons Joan, and they set off for the country for a brief experience of happiness. The rural idyll is breached by two murders: Arthur is wrongly pursued for the rape and murder of a blind girl; while seeking a hideaway from pursuers, Eileen murders a threatening farmer. The two return to London where Arthur is apprehended, charged, and hanged for the blind girl’s murder. Eileen, significantly, is not pursued.

The disturbing realities that punctuate the narrative (rape, murder, prostitution, the grinding poverty of the Depression era) are counterbalanced by the naive optimism of Arthur, expressed through the sentimental love songs of the period. Daydreams and reality are constantly juxtaposed, but Potter does not provide easy evaluations. It is possible to laugh at the simplicity of Arthur’s belief in the “truth” of the popular love songs he sells, but scorn the shallow cynicism of his salesmen companions. Arthur’s naïveté has to be balanced against his duplicity: although he loves Eileen and promises to help her, he scribbles down a wrong address and creates enormous complications for them. Yet, however sentimental the songs are, they point to a world of desire that, in some form, human beings need and that is otherwise unrecognized in popular discourse. Although Potter used popular music and Busby Berkeley–type choreography, Pennies is not a conventional musical: the music is not contemporary and thus arrives with a freight of period nostalgia. Moreover, the music is dubbed and the actors lip-synch (on occasion across gender lines) so that the effect is comic or ironic as well as enticingly nostalgic.

If the songs and dance routines are used to express unconscious desires or those beyond the characters’ ability to articulate, another device that provides access to the unconscious and interferes with any naturalistic reading is the use of doubles. Although physically and in terms of class distinctly different, Arthur and the accordion man, and Joan and Eileen, are potential versions of the same identity. While the accordion man is presumed to have raped and killed a blind girl (significantly, not shown), Arthur’s barely suppressed wish to rape her shows his equivalence. Similarly, Joan and Eileen, though opposites in terms of sexual repression, share a similar shrewd awareness of social reality. The main difference is that Eileen is led to defy social conventions while Joan is content to work within them, recognizing their power. Arthur’s limited understanding is compensated for by his naive passion for music and love, which offers a truth about how the world might be.

Pennies from Heaven can be seen as a development from the 1972 play Follow the Yellow Brick Road, in which the hero Jack Black, a television actor, shuns the real world in favor of the ideal world of television ads in which families are happy, the sun shines, and everybody is optimistic. The earlier play expresses a bleaker Manichean universe of good and evil, while the later work acknowledges the internal nature of good and evil and suggests the possibility of redemption, if not accommodation, between our lower and higher impulses. At a further remove, Pennies from Heaven can be seen to pick up the themes of the life-affirming power of transgressive behavior, and the comic/musical presentation of them, found in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728).