Stephen Mallatratt died of leukemia at the age 57. He achieved fame by
adapting Susan Hill's novel The Woman In Black which premiered in
Scarborough as a stocking filler over Christmas in 1987.
The Woman In Black is a classic thriller for two actors, the successor
to Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, is now the second longest-running West End
play - after The Mousetrap. It has been translated into a dozen
languages and produced in 40 countries.
In the mid-1970s, Mallatratt, while working as an actor in Alan
Ayckbourn's company in Scarborough, wrote An Englishman's Home. It was,
recalls Ayckbourn, a near-perfect first play. Like his better known
peers - John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Ayckbourn himself - Mallatratt's
writing was addressed and stamped by his experience as an actor.
Although never a "brand-name" playwright, Mallatratt's craft and
professionalism made him well-known as a core member of the Coronation
Street script-writing team from 1985, and as the author of such fine
television series as his 2002 version of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte
Saga and last year's Island At War, set on a fictional Channel Island.
Born and bred in Mill Hill, north London, he came from a lower
middle-class background. After Orange Hill school he defied
expectations in his brightness - "Oxbridge material" is the phrase - by
working briefly in the building trade, and training as an actor at the
Central School of Speech and Drama.
He caught the theatre bug in his teens as a member of the Watford
Palace audience. After Central, he worked as a rep actor and was
spotted by Ayckbourn in Ipswich. He was tall, slim, blond,
good-looking. Despite these handicaps, says Ayckbourn, he struggled
through. He exuded an air of diffidence and thoughtfulness, on and
offstage.
One of his closest friends, the actor David Neilson, who still plays a
Coronation Street character molded by Mallatratt, Roy Cropper, says
that he was a much better actor than he had the confidence for: "He had
an excellent line in scoutmasters and other English eccentrics."
When Ayckbourn invited Mallatratt to Scarborough, he was still under
contract to the Ipswich theatre, but he paid out his employers.
Mallatratt originated roles in such Ayckbourn modern masterpieces as
Confusions, Absent Friends and Bedroom Farce; other Ayckbourn protégés
of this glorious past half-century at Scarborough were the playwrights
James Saunders, Stephen Lowe, Robert Eaton and Tim Firth.
Mallatratt moved on to Bristol. When the Old Vic closed its
collaborative operation in the nearby Little Theatre in the late 1970s,
he and Neilson were among the outstanding group of actors who took the
place over; others were Daniel Day-Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite, Pam
Ferris and George Costigan.
One of the group's final productions was Mallatratt's Comic Cuts, about
a bingo hall swindling the Arts Council for funding. When the play was
revived in the West End 10 years later as The Glory Of The Garden, the
title of an Arts Council report, it was not so funny - the cuts were no
longer far-fetched. Too much reality had kicked in.
Mallatratt returned to Scarborough in autumn 1985 and acted in
Ayckbourn's production of The Brontes Of Howarth by Christopher Fry.
When Ayckbourn took a sabbatical to join Peter Hall as a National
Theatre associate, Mallatratt stayed on as the stand-in resident writer
for stand-in artistic director Robin Herford.
Herford commissioned a play about witchcraft in Heptonstall that became
the not too dissimilar precursor of The Woman In Black. The rest is
history; Herford's only regret is that Mallatratt was about to hit "an
even longer stride" as a dramatist.
He is survived by three successive wives, the actors Vanessa Mallatratt
and Eileen O'Brien (with whom he had a daughter, Hannah), and the stage
manager Emma London.
