Hill, Errol

August 5, 1921
September 15, 2003

Errol Hill was the foremost scholar, historian, and advocate of theater in the Caribbean and African America. These roles were founded on his practical involvement in the theater as actor, director, playwright, and teacher in a career that spanned some six decades and contributed significantly to the growth and appreciation of this art in his native Caribbean.

Born in Trinidad, West Indies, Hill, along with actor Errol John and others, founded the island's first indigenous theater company, the Whitehall Players, in 1947. Graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1951, Hill was appointed Extra-Mural Tutor in Drama at the University of the West Indies, where he stimulated and facilitated much of the development of Caribbean theater across the region. Following this assignment, Hill taught at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, for two years before taking up appointments in the United States, where he would settle for the rest of his life. He retired after thirty-five years at Dartmouth College as John D. Willard Professor of Drama and Oratory, Emeritus.

Hill's work and contribution to theater internationally represent the very emergence of the West Indies as a region from colonialism to nationalism and political independence to cultural affirmation on the world stage.

The son of a Methodist minister, Hill benefited from a sound colonial education, which involved an early exposure to the performing arts, one of his schoolmasters being the Trinidad playwright DeWilton Rogers. Theater for Hill, as for the majority of practitioners of the day, meant British theater. In Hill's case, this influence was reinforced by his links with the British Council, where he worked as secretary and whose premises at Whitehall lent its name to the company he formed. But the West Indian masses had emerged in the literature of the region at least a decade before, and as Hill pointed out, "critics called for native plays" (1972, p. 29). Hill responded to this mandate with Ping Pong (1950), the first play on the steelband, Trinidad's indigenous musical orchestra, which had emerged in the late 1930s.

Through his appointment in 1953 to the University of the West Indies, itself a symbol and instrument of a nascent nationhood, Hill championed and propagated the idea of an indigenous theater that would crown a federated West Indies. He undertook the herculean task himself, teaching enthusiastically among the countries between British Honduras and British Guiana the skills such an enterprise demanded. The year the political Federation fell apart, Hill wrote Man Better Man (1960), a play reflecting the composition and traditions of Trinidadian folk. The play represented the newly independent state at the 1965 Commonwealth Festival in Britain. Other dramas in this period, Dance Bongo (1964) and Whistling Charlie and the Monster (1964), a political satire, continued to demonstrate the possibilities of an indigenous West Indian theater.

Hill's two-year appointment at the University of Ibadan in 1965 and thereafter in the United States allowed him to consolidate his theories and pursue further research into the history of the largely unrecorded theater of the African diaspora. He wrote extensively on the constituent arts of Trinidad Carnival, authenticating them theatrically and placing them on the agenda for further academic study. This he accomplished most authoritatively in his seminal thesis, The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (1972).

In this and in his other papers on Caribbean theater, Hill's stand is clear and consistent. He argues that there is a role in the Caribbean for a purposeful and professional theater as an expression of national identity and social cohesion and that Caribbean society is the poorer for not yet possessing it. This theater, he contests, belongs to all people, not just a social elite, and the people regionally should have access to it. Moreover, Caribbean theater must be based on indigenous sources that the people of the region recognize as their own. In fact, the definition of theater in the African experience incorporates a multiplicity of forms quite unlike modern Western theater, and this multiplicity must be reflected on the national stage.

Professor Hill's scholarly, academic, and artistic achievements are recognized in the many prestigious awards he received in America, Europe, and the Caribbean.

See also Carnival in Brazil and the Caribbean; University of the West Indies

Bibliography

Hill, Errol. "Emergence of a National Drama in the West Indies." CQ 18, no. 4 (1972): 9–40.

Hill, Errol. The Jamaica Stage, 1665–1990: Profile of a Colonial Theatre. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Hill, Errol. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Hill, Errol. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. London: New Beacon, 1997.

Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

rawle gibbons (2005)