Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and openly Marxist writer for the stage and screen best known for his London and Broadway plays The Comedians, died March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. It was 88.
His agent, Nicki Stoddart, said the cause was heart failure.
A major figure on the English left, Mr Griffiths combined the political with the personal and expressed this affinity on a wide range of issues, whether related to British party politics or similar upheavals abroad.
He was most visible during the decade or so from 1975 onwards. This period included the premiere of Comedians in Nottingham, England in 1975, as well as its New York premiere in 1976—his only Broadway play—and his lone foray into Hollywood, partnering Warren Beatty in his script. for the critically acclaimed film ‘Reds’ (1981).
His plays gave Laurence Olivier his last stage role, in the National Theater premiere of The Party (1973)—an anatomy of the British left set against the backdrop of the 1968 political upheaval in Paris—and provided early opportunities for budding talents such as Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony Award for “The Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred in the American and British premieres of “Real Dreams” in the 1980s.
Set in Manchester among hopefuls in a late-night comedy class, “Comedians” has had several notable revivals over the years – among them a 2003 Off Broadway production, with Raúl Esparza inheriting the defining role of Mr. Pryce, and a at the Lyric in London. Hammersmith in 2009, David Dawson played the same role.
Mr. Price’s performance as the angry, class-conscious Gethin Price, who has cut his hair in a symbolic gesture, caused a sensation first in Nottingham and London and then in New York, where the then 29-year-old Mr. Price took the city playing Mr. Griffiths’ sleazy skinhead, who also happens to be an amateur comic. (Mr Price’s performance continues in a 1979 version filmed for the BBC.)
“There were a few hiccups along the way trying to relate a clean-shaven Manchester United fan to a New York audience,” Mr. Price said in a telephone interview.
But the work, Mr. Price said, “established me in America. Getting Tony” — in 1977 — “and being there meant I could go back and forth, which I’ve done all my life.”
Mr. Price’s recollections of that time include watching Mr. Griffiths “get carried away and carried away,” he said, by Mr. Beatty, who had approached Mr. Griffiths to write the screenplay for “Reds,” the historical Mr. Beatty’s film. saga about the Harvard-educated socialist activist and author John Reed.
“Politically, they were like-minded,” Mr. Price said of Mr. Beattie and Mr. Griffiths. “I think Trevor saw the film as a way to appeal to a larger audience for his beliefs and thoughts, although I don’t think he came out happy, per say.”
This was amply confirmed in a 2007 Vanity Fair article about the making of “Reds”.
“The atmosphere around us was poisonous, terrible,” Mr Griffiths told Peter Biskind, the author of the article. “It was messy, it was ugly, and it was dirty on both sides.” As a result, Mr. Griffiths walked away from the very film for which he shared a 1982 original-screen Oscar nomination with Mr. Beatty — his own Oscar acceptance speech that year, when he won best director, did not no report. his former colleague.
Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4, 1935, into a working-class family in Manchester: his father, Ernest, cleaned containers in an acid factory and his mother, Annie, was a bus conductor. Britain’s Education Act of 1944 widened access to good schools, which changed his horizons in an instant. He studied English at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1955, and then worked as a teacher and training officer at the BBC.
From the 1970s onwards, he combined writing for the theater with larger-scale work for television. An early play, ‘Occupations’, had several performances before being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a young Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley among the cast. His focus on the Italian Marxist writer and theorist Antonio Gramsci was typical of Mr. Griffiths’ interest in revolutions of all stripes — a self-styled playwright-provocateur who once said he wanted to “teach through entertainment.” (The play had a brief Off Broadway run in 1982.)
In “The Party,” Laurence Olivier played John Tagg, a Glaswegian Trotskyist who is at a posh London dinner party discussing the other meaning of the word – party politics. “It was fantastic to see him hold the stage with a Marxist lecture for 20 minutes,” Tony-winning playwright David Edgar, who saw the performance, said in an interview.
Mr. Griffiths’ original work for television included “Through the Night” (1975), inspired by his wife Janice’s experience with breast cancer, and “Bill Brand” (1976), an 11-part series which covers one year in the life of a worker. Member of Parliament of the party. “Country” (1981) was a family drama influenced by Mr. Griffiths’ earlier adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and aired as part of “Play for Today,” the BBC’s influential series devoted to socially engaged new writing .
He wrote Ken Loach’s 1986 film Fatherland, about a German singer-songwriter, and had long hoped to make a film with Richard Attenborough about American revolutionary Thomas Paine. This material resulted in a 2009 play, “A New World,” at Shakespeare’s Globe, in which John Light played the passionate flyer.
Mr. Griffiths’ adaptations included “Sons and Lovers” (1981), a six-part version for the BBC of the DH Lawrence novel, and “Piano,” a 1990 play for the National Theater adapted from a Russian 1977 film which itself takes as its source Chekhov’s early play Platonov.
Turkish director Mehmet Ergen, based in London, directed the Turkish premiere of “The Piano” in Istanbul in 2010, as well as the London premiere of Mr. Griffiths’ “Cherry Orchard,” which until then had only been shown regionally and on television. .
This revival of Chekhov ran at Mr. Ergen’s own Arcola Theater in East London in 2017 and proved to be the last major performance during Mr. Griffiths’ lifetime of one of his London plays.
In an interview, Mr Ergen spoke fondly of Mr Griffiths. In his later years, he said, Mr Griffiths “still believed that art had a special role to play in social change: Everything was political for him”.
Or, as Mr. Griffiths himself put it in a 2008 speech at the University of Manchester, his alma mater, about the drive for social awareness and improvement that was ever-present within him: “An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. He will march on the horizon of the world and conquer.”
Mr Griffiths married Janice Stansfield in 1960. She died in a plane crash in 1977. He is survived by their three children, Sian, Emma and Joss, and his second wife, Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, whom he married in 1992. .