Ken Hill

Who was Ken Hill?

Ken Hill was a critically acclaimed English playwright, and theatre director.

He was a protégé of Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop. He was happiest directing chaotic musicals on the tiny stage of the old Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Workshop's home in Stratford, London, for many years but he also had hits in the West End and abroad, among them The Invisible Man and the original stage version of The Phantom of the Opera, which inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber to create his musical blockbuster of the same title.

His stock-in-trade was musical adventure stories. Like Joan Littlewood, his aim was to make things look fresh and improvised, to which end he might spend hours working on one tiny scene with his cast. He set his lyrics to out-of-copyright popular tunes, so that the audience felt familiar with his songs without ever quite being able to place them, and, more importantly, so that music could be adapted without paying royalties the budgets at Theatre Workshop being famously small. He had an encyclopaedic musical knowledge. For example, in his final show, Zorro The Musical!, his lyrics were accompanied by melodies from 19th-century Spanish operetta.