Trevor Griffiths

Trevor Griffiths (born 4 April 1935 in Ancoats, Manchester) is an English dramatist.

Raised as a Catholic, he attended the local Catholic school before being accepted into Manchester University in 1952 to read English. After a brief involvement with professional football and a year in National Service, he became a teacher. He soon became chairman of the Manchester Left Club, and the editor of the Labour Party's Northern Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism, began writing plays, and was eventually commissioned by Tony Garnett to provide a script for The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70). The play, "The Love Maniac", was about a teacher, but even though Garnett took the commission with him when he moved to London Weekend Television and formed Kestrel Productions, it was never produced.

Buoyed by Garnett's enthusiasm and influenced by the Paris evenements of May 1968, he wrote Occupations, a stage play about Gramsci and the Fiat factory occupations of 1920s Italy. The play soon brought him to the attention of Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager of the National Theatre who promptly commissioned Griffiths to write the play that became The Party. This critique of the British revolutionary left (featuring the National's artistic director Laurence Olivier in his last stage role as the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg) was a critical failure, and was also disparaged by fellow left-wing playwrights as a doomed attempt to launch a radical play from such a deeply conservative establishment as the National Theatre. But Griffiths profoundly believed in attempting to use popular forms as a vehicle for radical political ideas (known as 'strategic penetration'), and this naturally led him to consider television as the best medium for communicating with a wider audience.

There followed a series of television plays such as "All Good Men" (Play for Today, BBC, 31/01/1974) and "Absolute Beginners" (BBC, 19/04/1974, in the series Fall of Eagles), which rapidly established Griffiths' ability to dramatise ideological conflicts, and to provide devastating critiques of political power structures. He developed this further with his series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), which was probably the summation of his dialectic technique, and had in the meantime returned triumphantly to the theatre with the Nottingham Playhouse production of Comedians directed by Richard Eyre first performed on 20 February 1975, which later transferred to Broadway. Comedians is set in an evening class in a school in Manchester, where a bunch of budding comics gather for a final briefing before performing to an agent from London. The play is set in real time, ie; as the real time is 7.27, the clock on the wall of the school room also says 7.27. The text of the play was first published in 1976 and is now a popular A-level text.

Griffiths' reputation at the time was such that Warren Beatty asked him to write a screenplay for his long cherished project about the US revolutionary John Reed, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (US, 1981).

His experience on Reds seemed to produce a more cinematic sensibility in subsequent work. Although he continued to work in the theatre, gaining a notable success with his translation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the touring version of Oi for England (ITV, 17/04/1982), his next television play, Country (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 20/10/1981), was a departure: a period piece made entirely on film, with a portrayal of the aristocracy that contained none of the political rhetoric familiar from his earlier plays. But the political analysis was just as acute, if not more so, and subtly examined the nature of Conservatism through the prism of the United Kingdom general election, 1945. He then went on to write the serial Last Place on Earth (ITV, 1985).

These works represented the end of Griffiths' rich period of television drama; the advent of Thatcher, and the reduced opportunities for a writer of the single play, let alone such a political writer as Griffiths, led him back to the theatre, where he has produced a number of plays over the last fifteen years to varying degrees of commercial and critical success.

Griffiths' preoccupation with left-wing ideas, his engagement with the various forms of Marxism, and his stringent class analysis have caused many critics to see him as outmoded and somewhat arid. But Griffiths has a powerful dramatic sense, and an ability to craft dialogue that makes the most complex ideas seem clear and vital. An index of his quality is the fact that virtually every one of his works, either on television or in the theatre, has been highly controversial, providing sure evidence that even when being dismissed by critics, his plays prick against the body politic. His most recent television play, Food for Ravens (BBC, 15/11/1997), was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of Aneurin Bevan's birth, but at one point the BBC decided not to network the play, and instead restrict it to Wales. Only a newspaper campaign led by Griffiths and the star Brian Cox caused the BBC to relent, and it was finally shown in a late-night slot on BBC2. Griffiths cannot have been surprised by this treatment, or the critical brickbats that were used to argue against the showing.

The eclipse of Griffiths' work and reputation has been predictable because of cultural and political changes, but he stands out as a great force in television drama. Despite his considerable success in the theatre, he was and remains a television dramatist, no different from when he said in 1976 that "I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television". Griffiths believed "that if for every Sweeney that went out, a Bill Brand went out, there would be a real struggle for the popular imagination... and people would be free to make liberating choices about where reality lies." The films he has written include Reds (1981) (cowritten with Warren Beatty and others) and Fatherland, directed by Ken Loach.

In November 2008 Griffiths participated in a discussion on “The Writer and Revolution” with the World Socialist Web Site's arts editor David Walsh at the University of Manchester.

External links

• Video: “The Writer and Revolution” Part 1
• Trevor Griffiths’ These are the Times: a Life of Thomas Paine

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