Trevor Griffiths, a prolific writer of stage and screen and a Marxist widely known for his London and Broadway play “The Comedians,” died on March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. He is 88 years old.
His agent, Nicky Stoddart, said the cause was heart failure.
A prominent figure on the English left, Mr. Griffiths conflated the political with the personal, and expressed that relationship across a wide range of topics related to British party politics or comparable uprisings abroad.
He became more visible in the decade or so from 1975 onwards. That period included the premiere of “Comedians” in Nottingham, England, in 1975, as well as the New York premiere in 1976 – his only Broadway play – and his lone foray into Hollywood, collaborating on the screenplay with Warren Beatty for the highly acclaimed film “Reds” (1981).
His plays are sanctioned Laurence Olivier His last stage role was in the National Theater premiere of “The Party” (1973) – an anatomy of the British left against the backdrop of political upheaval in 1968 Paris – and offered opportunities for emerging talent. They include Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony for “Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred in the American and British premieres of Griffiths’ play “Real Dreams” in the 1980s.
“The Comedians,” founded in Manchester amid promise in the late-night comedy class, has had notable revivals over the years, including a 2003 Off-Broadway production with Raul Esparza in the career-defining role of Mr. Price, and one at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, with David Dawson playing the same role.
Mr. Price’s performance as the angry, class-conscious Gethin Price, who cuts his hair in a symbolic gesture, first caused a stir in Nottingham and London, and then in New York, where the 29-year-old Mr. Price played the town. Mr. Griffiths is a bilious skinhead who is an amateur comic. (Mr Price’s performance was revived in a 1979 version filmed for the BBC.)
“There have been some hiccups along the way trying to connect the shaven-headed Manchester United supporters to the New York crowd,” Mr. Price said in a phone interview.
But the play, “founded me in America; Getting Tony” — in 1977 — “and taking a step there means I can go back and forth, which I’ve done all my life.”
At that time Mr. Price’s recollections of Mr. Griffiths included seeing him as “favored and infatuated”, he said, adding that the “Reds” were Mr. Mr. Beatty wrote the screenplay for the historical film. Griffiths landed on Mr. Beattie said. An epic about Harvard-educated socialist activist and author John Reed.
“Politically, they were like-minded,” Mr. Mr. Price Beatty and Mr. said of Griffiths. “I think Trevor saw the film as a way to get a wider audience for his beliefs and ideas, although I don’t think he came away happy, let’s say.”
That much was confirmed in a 2007 Vanity Fair article about the making of the “Reds.”
“The atmosphere around us is poisoned, terrifying,” Mr Griffiths told the paper’s author, Peter Biskind. “It was chaotic, it was vicious and it was foulmouthed on both sides.” As a result, Mr. Griffiths left the film, which went on to share an Oscar nomination with Mr. Beatty for 1982’s original screenplay — his own Academy Award acceptance speech that year, when he won for best director, made no mention of it. His one-time colleague.
Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4, 1935 in Manchester into a working class family. His father, Ernest, cleaned vats in an acid factory and his mother, Anne, was a bus conductor. Britain’s Education Act of 1944, which expanded access to good schools, changed his horizons in an instant. He studied English at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1955, and later worked as a teacher and education officer for the BBC.
From the 1970s, Mr. Griffiths combined writing for the theater with large-scale work for television. An early play, “Occupations”, had several runs before being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a young Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley in the cast. Its focus on the Italian Marxist writer and theorist Antonio Gramsci is characteristic of Mr Griffiths’ interest in revolutions of all stripes – a self-appointed dramatist-provocateur who once said he was keen to “teach by entertaining”. (The play saw a brief Broadway run in 1982.)
In “The Party,” Laurence Olivier plays John Tagg, a Glaswegian Trotskyist who is at an upscale London dinner party discussing another meaning of that word — party politics. “It was amazing to see him hold the stage for 20 minutes with a Marxist lecture,” Tony Award-winning playwright David Edgar, who saw the performance, said in an interview.
Mr. for TV. Griffiths’ seminal work includes “Through the Night” (1975), inspired by his wife Janice’s experience with breast cancer, and “Bill Brand” (1976), an 11-part series covering a year in the life of a worker. Member of Parliament Party. “Country” (1981) is a family drama Mr. Griffiths was influenced by an earlier adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and was screened as part of “Play for Today,” an influential BBC series devoted to socially engaged new writing.
He wrote the 1986 Ken Loach film “Fatherland” about the German singer-songwriter and had long hoped to make a film. Richard Attenborough about American revolutionary Thomas Paine; That material culminated in the 2009 play “A New World” at Shakespeare’s Globe, in which John Light played the impassioned pamphleteer.
Mr. Griffiths’ adaptations included “Sons and Lovers” (1981), a six-part version for the BBC of the DH Lawrence novel, and “The Piano”, a 1990 play for the National Theater adapted from a 1977 Russian film. Its source is the early Chekhov play “Platonov”.
London-based Turkish director Mehmet Ergen directed the Turkish premiere of “Piano” in Istanbul in 2010, as well as the London stage premiere of Mr. Griffiths’ “Cherry Orchard,” which until then had only been seen regionally and on TV.
That Chekhov revival took place in 2017 at Mr. Ergen’s own Arcola Theater in east London and became the last major performance of one of Mr. Griffiths’ plays in London during his lifetime.
He married Janice Stansfield in 1960; He died in a plane crash in 1977. He has three children, Sian, Emma and Jose, with his second wife Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, who he married in 1992.
In an interview, Mr. Ergen spoke fondly of Mr. Griffiths. In his later years, Mr. Griffiths “still thought that art had a definite role to play in social change: everything was political to him.”
Or, Mr. As Griffiths himself said in a 2008 speech at the University of Manchester, regarding his ever-present urge for social awareness and reform: “The army of principle cannot where the army marches in. It marches on the horizon of the world and it conquers.