Stephen Mallatratt

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.