Trevor Griffiths
Encyclopedia
Trevor Griffiths is an English dramatist.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, he attended Saint Bede's College
St Bede's College, Manchester
St Bede's College, Manchester is an independent Roman Catholic day school situated on Alexandra Road South in the Whalley Range area of the city, and is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference....

, 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
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

's Northern Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism, began writing plays, and was eventually commissioned by Tony Garnett
Tony Garnett
Tony Garnett is a film producer who has worked in feature films and on British television. He was born in Birmingham, England, and studied psychology at the University of London....

 to provide a script for The Wednesday Play
The Wednesday Play
The Wednesday Play was an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. Every week's play was usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured...

(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
London Weekend Television
London Weekend Television was the name of the ITV network franchise holder for Greater London and the Home Counties including south Suffolk, middle and east Hampshire, Oxfordshire, south Bedfordshire, south Northamptonshire, parts of Herefordshire & Worcestershire, Warwickshire, east Dorset and...

 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
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...

, the literary manager of the National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...

 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
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...

 in his last stage role as the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg) failed. A series of television plays, such as "All Good Men" (Play for Today
Play for Today
Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted...

, BBC, 31 January 1974) and "Absolute Beginners" (BBC, 19 April 1974, in the series Fall of Eagles
Fall of Eagles
Fall of Eagles is a 13-part British television drama aired by the BBC in 1974. The series was created by John Elliot and produced by Stuart Burge....

), followed. He developed this further with his series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), which was probably the summation of his dialectic technique.

In the meantime Griffiths returned to the theatre with the Nottingham Playhouse
Nottingham Playhouse
The Nottingham Playhouse is a theatre in Nottingham, England. It was first established as a repertory theatre in the 1950s when it operated from a former cinema. Directors during this period included Val May and Frank Dunlop.-The building:...

 production of Comedians
Comedians (play)
Comedians is a play by Trevor Griffiths, set in a Manchester evening class for aspiring working-class comedians. It was first performed at the Nottingham Playhouse on 20 February 1975, in a production directed by Richard Eyre. The cast included Jonathan Pryce as the main character, Gethin Price,...

directed by Richard Eyre
Richard Eyre
Sir Richard Charles Hastings Eyre CBE is an English director of film, theatre, television, and opera.-Biography:Eyre was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in north-west Dorset in south-west England, followed by Peterhouse at the University...

 first performed on 20 February 1975, which later transferred to Broadway. Comedians
Comedians (play)
Comedians is a play by Trevor Griffiths, set in a Manchester evening class for aspiring working-class comedians. It was first performed at the Nottingham Playhouse on 20 February 1975, in a production directed by Richard Eyre. The cast included Jonathan Pryce as the main character, Gethin Price,...

is set 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, i.e.; 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
Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has received a total of fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Director in 1982. He has also won four Golden Globe Awards including the Cecil B. DeMille Award.-Early life and...

 reportedly asked him to write a screenplay for project about the US revolutionary John Reed
John Reed
-Arts, letters, and entertainment:* John Reed , New York novelist and author* John Reed , actor and singer with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company* John Reed , Australian critic and art patron...

, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (1981). He also wrote the screenplay for Fatherland
Fatherland (Ken Loach film)
Fatherland is a 1986 film directed by Ken Loach and starring Gerulf Pannach, Fabienne Babe and Critine Rose....

, which was directed by Ken Loach
Ken Loach
Kenneth "Ken" Loach is a Palme D'Or winning English film and television director.He is known for his naturalistic, social realist directing style and for his socialist beliefs, which are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as homelessness , labour rights and child abuse at the...

.

Griffiths continued to work in the theatre, garnering a notable success with the touring production of Oi for England (ITV, 17 April 1982). His teleplay, Country (BBC, 20 October 1981) was a rarity for Griffiths, a period piece
Period piece
-Setting:In the performing arts, a period piece is a work set in a particular era. This informal term covers all countries, all periods and all genres...

 that contained none of the political rhetoric familiar from his earlier works. Griffiths examined the nature of Conservatism through the prism of the 1945 general election
United Kingdom general election, 1945
The United Kingdom general election of 1945 was a general election held on 5 July 1945, with polls in some constituencies delayed until 12 July and in Nelson and Colne until 19 July, due to local wakes weeks. The results were counted and declared on 26 July, due in part to the time it took to...

. He wrote the television serial, Last Place on Earth (ITV, 1985).

The advent of Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...

, 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's most recent teleplay, Food for Ravens (BBC, 15 November 1997), was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of Aneurin Bevan
Aneurin Bevan
Aneurin "Nye" Bevan was a British Labour Party politician who was the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1959 until his death in 1960. The son of a coal miner, Bevan was a lifelong champion of social justice and the rights of working people...

'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.
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.... [t]hat if for every Sweeney
The Sweeney
The Sweeney is a 1970s British television police drama focusing on two members of the Flying Squad, a branch of the Metropolitan Police specialising in tackling armed robbery and violent crime in London...

that went out, a Bill Brand went out, there would be a real struggle for the popular imagination.... [a]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
World Socialist Web Site
The World Socialist Web Site is the online news and information center of the International Committee of the Fourth International . The site publishes articles and analysis covering a wide range of topics and events all around the world. The daily 'Perspective' article presents the position of the...

's arts editor David Walsh at the University of Manchester. In 2009 he completed the play A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine
A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine
A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine is a 2009 biographical play by the English playwright Trevor Griffiths on the life of Thomas Paine. Other characters in it include Benjamin Franklin , George Washington, Edmund Burke, John Adams and Georges Danton...

.

He will also be partaking in the Bush Theatre
Bush Theatre
The Bush Theatre is based in Shepherd's Bush, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. It was established in 1972 above The Bush public house by Brian McDermott, and has since become one of the most celebrated new writing theatres in the world. An intimate venue renowned for its close-up...

's 2011 project Sixty Six where he has written a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible

External links

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