Michael Abbensetts obituary

The legacy of the colonial experience in the Caribbean, with its confusions of racial identity and mixed-blessing migration to Britain in the 1960s, was a potent theme in the stage and television work of Michael Abbensetts, who has died aged 78. In his most personal play, El Dorado (1984), a white Caribbean matriarch plans to pass on the family mansion to her black grandson, a doctor, but the grandson knows about slaves buried under the floorboards and decides to make his own life and contribution as a GP in London.

Abbensetts, who was born in Guyana and took British citizenship in 1974, wrote honestly of what he knew – and he knew a lot – about roots, racial tensions, mixed-race relationships, cultural power games, tolerance and integration. With his immediate British Caribbean playwriting contemporaries, Trevor Rhone and Mustapha Matura, he channelled this material into memorable drama, not laugh-a-minute comedy, though he could be funny and ironic. And with the drama series Empire Road on BBC television in 1978, he was the first black British playwright to be so commissioned. For all its talk of diversity, the BBC has produced little by way of black television drama since that time.

Empire Road was a sort of black Coronation Street, set in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. It was not an idealised portrait of the community, nor was it really a soap in its recognisable gallery of characters, family issues and business rivalries, and in its emotional scenes written with a light touch and a wry wit. The cast was an A-list of British black actors, relishing this rare opportunity: they included Norman Beaton, Corinne Skinner-Carter, Joseph Marcell, Thomas Baptiste and Rudolph Walker.

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In the second of only two seasons, directed by Horace Ové, there was an all-black production unit. There was no third season, however, not because of falling viewing figures (the converse was the case) but because the BBC Pebble Mill producers wanted to make room in the limited slots available for drama series for the upcoming adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man. At the time, they thought that Empire Road, or something similar, would return in some other shape or form. But it never did.

Abbensetts’s writing was enriched by his own sensitivity about his ethnicity. His maternal grandmother was Jewish. His Guyanese parents, Neville, a doctor, and Elaine, were, respectively, half Swiss and half Portuguese. Michael was born in Georgetown, in what was then British Guiana, and educated at Queen’s college secondary school (1952-56) – also the alma mater of ER Braithwaite, author of To Sir, With Love, the Test cricketer Roger Harper and the politician and writer Trevor Phillips. Then he was sent as a boarder to Stanstead college in Quebec, and studied at St George Williams University, Montreal (1960-61).

He moved to the UK and started writing short stories. He had decided to try the theatre after seeing a revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in Montreal, and sent a play about being a solitary black face in Canada to the fearsome agent Peggy Ramsay. “Why don’t you write a play about being black in London, darling?” was her brutally encouraging response.

While trying to find his feet, he worked as a security officer at the Tower of London (1963-67) and as an attendant at Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This latter experience fuelled his first half-hour television play, The Museum Attendant (1973), in which his surrogate character, Howard, played by Horace James, felt humiliated by a white, heavily tattooed colleague.

His first stage play, Sweet Talk (1973), with Don Warrington and Mona Hammond superbly playing an unhappy couple in a small room with one unseen, unwanted child, and another on the way, was directed by Stephen Frears at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs. It won the George Devine award and in the following year Abbensetts was appointed the Court’s resident writer. Frears also directed Black Christmas (1977) for BBC television, about a fractious black family get-together with “white” Christmas entertainment on the box, described by one critic as “one of the best TV dramas of the 70s”.

After Empire Road, and a play about the reunion of two black RAF veterans at a lunch party on Armistice Day, In the Mood (1981), with Beaton, Hammond and the hilarious, bendy-limbed Stefan Kalipha, skilfully directed by Robin Lefèvre at Hampstead Theatre Club, Abbensetts took up a visiting professorship at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (1983-84).

There he met Connie, a lawyer, whom he married; the couple settled in Texas. She died of cancer towards the end of the 80s. Abbensetts returned to Britain, writing an emotional thriller about old friends and young criminals, Big George Is Dead (1987), for Channel 4 and a four-part comic drama, Little Napoleons (1994), also for Channel 4, in which two rival solicitors, played by Beaton and Saeed Jaffrey, vied for supremacy and racial bragging rights (British Caribbean versus British Asian) as local councillors.

When Beaton, who had appeared in so much of Abbensetts’s work on stage and screen, died in 1994, Abbensetts felt as though he had lost his voice, and he wrote very little thereafter. In the new century he taught at the City and Guilds of London Art School and the University of North London (now London Metropolitan University).

In 2005, he married Liz Bluett. The couple separated a few years later, but never divorced. He is survived by a daughter, Justine, from an earlier relationship, with Anne Stewart, and by two grandchildren, Sean and Danielle, and a sister, Elizabeth.