Clive King obituary

My friend Clive King, who has died aged 61 of heart failure, was an Irish writer, lyricist, journalist and script editor based in Scotland. His plays were performed in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. Born in Dublin, Clive was the eldest of the three children of Tommy King, who worked for Guinness, and his wife, Helen (nee Browne), a secretary. He attended Sandymount high school and in 1984 emigrated to London as part of an Irish exodus caused by recession and high unemployment. As an out gay man he also preferred to move to a country where homosexuality was not illegal. Into the late 1980s Clive worked as a journalist on computer magazines before deciding to take a degree in film, video and photographic arts at the University of Westminster, graduating in 1994. He followed up with an MA in screenwriting at the London College of Printing. Afterwards he returned to journalism with the Times as a picture editor and film feature writer, and in his spare time he wrote plays. In 1994 two of them, Turning On and Revving Up, were staged at the King’s Head theatre in Islington, north London, and, in 1999, Tall Stories was performed at the Bird’s Nest in Deptford, south-east London, while My Son the Sheik was put on at the Gielgud theatre a few months later. In 2001 Clive was hired as a script writer for Carlton Television on the relaunch of the TV soap Crossroads, and in 2003 he moved to Glasgow to work, writing scripts on another soap, BBC Scotland’s River City, on a temporary basis. Clive remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life. It was there, in 2006, that he and I began to work together on musical theatre projects, with me as composer and musical director and Clive as lyricist and book writer. Our first commission was in 2007, for a mini-musical, Meeting Matthew, at the Òran Mór theatre in Glasgow, which subsequently hosted a number of our other productions, including Wee Free! (2017), Melania (2018) and Kiki: Deathbed Cabaret (2022), the last of which was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023. Clive’s final creative adventure was a children’s Christmas play, Special Delivery, performed in 2024 at Cumbernauld theatre and written with the composer Karen MacIver. We continued writing and recording songs and developing ideas for musicals right up to his death. Outside the theatre, in 2005 Clive began volunteering for the Project for HIV & Aids Care and Education (Phace), where he helped to set up self-awareness workshops. After Phace merged with the Terrence Higgins Trust he moved into full-time work with the charity as its partnership and development manager for Scotland. In 2020 Clive became strategy and advocacy manager at the McFarlane Trust, a charity providing care and housing support to adults with a learning disability. He was a popular, charismatic, kind and quick-witted man, although he was never afraid to challenge those with views he abhorred. He is survived by his mother and his sisters, Sinead and Joanne.