Trevor Griffiths

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),^{[citation needed]} 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

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 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."^{[citation needed]}

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

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'