 Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4th 1935 in Ancoats, Manchester. Raised as a Catholic (although his brother was not), he attended the local Catholic school
before being accepted into Manchester University in 1952 to read English. These
early years were frequently returned to in his plays, particularly the figures
of his chemical process worker father and his elder brother, who was born too
early to benefit, like Griffiths, from the 1944 Butler Education Bill. There
followed a flirtation with professional football, and a year in National
Service, before he became a teacher. He was then introduced to a network of
academics by his future wife, and that experience made him "begin to get some
cultural humility, and... see that I had a lot to learn." Learning fast, he
became chairman of the Manchester Left Club, and the editor of Labour's Northern
Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism and 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.
However, buoyed up 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 artistic director of the National Theatre, who
promptly commissioned Griffiths to write the play that became The Party. This
critique of the British revolutionary left (featuring Laurence Olivier in his
last role at the National as the Glaswegian Trotskyite 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 brilliant television plays such as 'All Good Men' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 31/01/1974) and 'Absolute Beginners' (BBC, tx. 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 epic 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 1975 production of Comedians, which later
transferred to Broadway. His 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, tx. 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 1945 General Election. The unrealised
series of six films, of which 'Country' was intended to be the first, has to be
one of the great 'what ifs' of television drama. He then went on to write
the serial Last Place on Earth (ITV, 1985), which attempted to use the heroic
myth of Robert Falcon Scott to look afresh at the then recent echoes of empire
evinced by the Falklands War.
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 at his best
(which was most of the time) 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, tx.
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, but the script was of an extremely high quality and a worthy addition to his oeuvre.
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 to 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."
It is a shame for us, and for him, that we now see his work so rarely on our
screens.
John Williams
|
FILM & TV CREDITS
