AS A playwright, Nick Darke usually stuck to what he knew. Many of his plays were set in his native Cornwall; those placed elsewhere were still connected to his love of the sea, of water, of fishing, foraging, artisan families or his theme of traditional, honest toil and good working men broken or perverted by bureaucracy, edicts and expediency.
Nicholas Temperley Watson Darke was born in St Eval, north Cornwall, the son of a fisherman and an actress. He was determined to become an actor and, after being expelled from school for vandalising the cricket pitch, he attended Rose Bruford College in Sidcup, London.
He then went to the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent. He wrote a pantomime script for Mother Goose in 1977 and decided to concentrate on scriptwriting, encouraged by his peers at the Victoria who commissioned his first play, Never Say Rabbit in a Boat, the next year.
A Tickle of the River’s Back (1979), written for the Theatre Royal, Stratford, concerned London lightermen at their dying trade. Catch (1981), first performed at the Royal Court Theatre and produced two years later as a radio play, concerned two Cornish fisherman who, hobbled by European Community requirements, turn in desperation to smuggling cocaine.
Darke later joined the Kneehigh Company, founded in 1980 as a children’s theatre group. One of his plays for them, The King of Prussia, was also about smuggling. “The South Coast of England is more obsessed with smuggling than it was in the 18th century,” observed the FT’s reviewer. “In that respect, Nick Darke’s The King Of Prussia . . . is as topical as it is historical.” At Chichester Festival Theatre in 1999, the production featured a steeply raked stage with trap doors, curtains, pulleys and sails to take the audience from cliff top to schooner to prison cell.
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Among Darke’s other plays were Summer Trade, in which a traditional Cornish pub landlord hands over to a moderniser; The Riot, based on unrest in Newlyn in the late 19th century when Methodist fishermen feared displacement by “incomers” from Lowestoft, who were prepared to fish on Sundays; The Body, produced in 1983 for the RSC at the Pit, London; and The Dead Monkey, also for the RSC, featuring a deadbeat ex-surfer played by David Soul.
In 2001 Darke suffered a stroke which left him unable to speak, but it gave him, with the help of his wife, the material to produce Dumbstruck, probably the best of all his productions for radio.
Fishing was essential to Darke’s sense of self. As long as he was able to, he would check his lobster pots and nets in the waters of Porthcothan Bay.
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Nick Darke, playwright, was born on August 29, 1948. He died of cancer on June 10, 2005, aged 56