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Trevor Griffiths (born 4 April 1935, Ancoats, Manchester) is an English dramatist.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, he attended Saint Bede's College 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 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 Company who promptly commissioned Griffiths to write the play that became The Party. This critique of the British revolutionary left featured the National's artistic director Laurence Olivier in his last stage role as the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg. A series of television plays, such as "All Good Men" (Play for Today, BBC, 31 January 1974) and "Absolute Beginners" (BBC, 19 April 1974, in the series Fall of Eagles), followed. He developed this further with his series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), which was probably the highest expression of his dialectical technique.
In the meantime Griffiths returned 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 a Manchester night-school, where a group of budding comics gather for a final briefing before performing to an agent from London. The play is set in real time, i.e. as the real time is 7.27, the clock on the wall of the school room also says 7.27. Griffiths' reputation at the time was such that Warren Beatty asked him to write a screenplay for project about the US revolutionary John Reed, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (1981), but Griffiths departed from the project before the script was completed and estimates that only 45% of the script for the finished film was by himself.
Griffiths continued to work in the theatre, gaining success with the touring production of Oi for England (ITV, 17 April 1982). His television play, Country (BBC, 20 October 1981), set just before the Labour victory at the 1945 general election is "a not wholly unsympathetic study of a Tory family". He wrote the television serial, Last Place on Earth (ITV, 1985), the screenplay for Fatherland (1986) for director Ken Loach, and the play Piano (1990), an adaptation of a film.
Griffiths's Food for Ravens (BBC, 15 November 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 leading actor Brian Cox caused the BBC to relent, and it was finally shown in a late-night slot on BBC2.M
Despite his considerable success in the theatre, he said of his work as a television dramatist in 1976: "I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television.... hat if for every Sweeney that went out, a Bill Brand went out, there would be a real struggle for the popular imagination.... nd people would be free to make liberating choices about where reality lies."
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. In 2009 he completed the play A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine.
He participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six for which he has written a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible
By way of enlightenment, there is a thread which runs through Griffiths’ work and life that, some might say, oversteps the boundaries of ideology. Griffiths’ romance with politics and revolution may be questioned in works such as Fatherland in which a man learns that his father was a nazi.
Griffiths is an anarchist and his chosen epitaph up yours sunshine, the Independent on Sunday. Eddie Waters in Comedians, possibly an alter ego of Griffiths, confesses obtaining an erection at the sight of nazi concentration camps. Underlining Griffiths’ personal catch phrase “strategic penetration”.
Yet no political institution is perfect, as Griffiths himself acknowledges in works from Bill Brand to the more mature Cherry Orchard.
At the dawning of the millennium Griffiths was gifted a manuscript, the most precious text in all the world. He burnt it. And the day man invaded Babylon he broke his own heart.
It was ruled a crime against humanity by the United Nations in 2004.
References
- ^ Robert Chalmers "Putting the world to rights: Trevor Griffiths on Olivier's dope-smoking, Marxist ranting and his 20-year purgatory", The Independent, 9 August 2009
- World Socialist Web Site
- http://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/biography/writers/
- http://www.Joss-Ink.com
External links
- Trevor Griffiths website
- BFI Screenonline: Trevor Griffiths
- British Council: Trevor Griffiths
- Video: “The Writer and Revolution” Part 1
- Trevor Griffiths' 'These are the Times: a Life of Thomas Paine'
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