Errol Hill

Dramatist and foremost historian of black theatre

Errol Gaston Hill, theatre historian, playwright and director: born Port of Spain, Trinidad 5 August 1921; Extramural Staff Tutor in Drama, University of the West Indies 1953-58, 1962-65; Professor of Drama and Oratory, Dartmouth College 1968-89 (Emeritus); married 1956 Grace Hope (one son, three daughters); died Hanover, New Hampshire 15 September 2003.

Before he became a highly respected dramatist and theatre historian, Errol Hill was partly responsible for forming the modern era in Caribbean theatre. As early as 1946 he founded, with another Trinidadian, Errol John, the Whitehall Players, one of the first theatre companies in the Caribbean.

With British Council support and its headquarters at Whitehall, Port of Spain, the Players adopted the policy of taking their productions to the people, performing at hospitals and other public institutions and in the open air in small towns and villages. An issue of the journal The Caribbean Writer noted in 2001,

When the urgency for plays with West Indian themes and language became apparent, Hill not only wrote his own, but also advanced Caribbean drama with notable innovations. He utilised the vernacular, a radical and controversial departure for the time, and incorporated aspects of Trinidadian and Caribbean culture.

Hill was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1921 and, after forming the Whitehall Players, in 1949 received a British Council scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1951 he gained a diploma from Rada, and he was also awarded a diploma in dramatic art from London University. At the Colonial Students' Residence in Hans Crescent House, London, Hill directed the members of the West Indian Student Association in two productions: Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (1951) and Derek Walcott's Henri Christophe (1952). The casts included many names that would soon become famous in Caribbean literature, culture and politics.

Although Hill found work as an actor and announcer on BBC radio in 1951-52, including the popular series Caribbean Voices, roles for black actors in Britain in the early 1950s were extremely limited. However, in 1950 Hill did find an opening with the left-wing Unity Theatre.

Returning to the Caribbean in 1953, Hill was appointed as a drama tutor at the Extra-Mural Department of the newly opened University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. In 1955 he began to publish plays with Caribbean themes in the Extra-Mural Department's Caribbean Plays series. For many years, this series provided the only available texts of Caribbean drama.

His first published collection included his own steel-band play The Ping-Pong (1958). In 1958 Hill received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend the Yale School of Drama where, in 1962, he gained a BA and an MFA in playwriting. His calypso verse-play Man Better Man, first produced at Yale in 1960, represented Trinidad and Tobago at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Britain in 1965 and this was televised by the BBC.

In 1966 Hill was awarded a doctorate in theatre history and his dissertation, The Trinidad Carnival: mandate for a national theatre, was published in 1972. Hill went on to write and edit some of the most important books on African- American and Caribbean theatre, earning him international acclaim and a reputation as the foremost historical scholar in these fields. These include A Time and a Season: 8 Caribbean plays (1976), produced for Jamaica Carifesta '76, Shakespeare in Sable: a history of black Shakespearean actors (1984), Plays for Today (1985), The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: profile of a colonial theatre (1992), The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994) and A History of African American Theatre (2003).

In 1965 he was seconded to the newly established Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where he taught theatre history and playwriting and directed. In 1967 he moved to America to teach first at Richmond College, Staten Island, then at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He retired from Dartmouth in 1989. Asked about his careers as actor, teacher, historian, director and playwright, Hill replied:

At different stages in my life certain things were more important to me. I enjoyed directing a lot because I could choose plays that I wanted to do, from every conceivable period of theatre, and I had the freedom to do them with the best available students, talented students. That was wonderful. Acting and directing - I loved that, [but] nobody was getting the history right; nobody was interested in what went before. So I started it, it had to be done. Whenever I felt there was a need, I took it on.

Stephen Bourne