{"id":26155,"date":"2024-04-09T19:54:04","date_gmt":"2024-04-09T23:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/trevor-griffiths-marxist-writer-for-stage-and-screen-dies-at-88\/09\/04\/2024\/"},"modified":"2024-04-09T19:54:04","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T23:54:04","slug":"trevor-griffiths-marxist-writer-for-stage-and-screen-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/trevor-griffiths-marxist-writer-for-stage-and-screen-dies-at-88\/09\/04\/2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Trevor Griffiths, Marxist Writer for Stage and Screen, Dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist writer for stage and screen most widely known for his play \u201cComedians,\u201d which was staged in London and on Broadway, died on March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. He was 88.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His agent, Nicki Stoddart, said the cause was heart failure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">An important figure on the English left, Mr. Griffiths conjoined the political with the personal and expressed that affinity across a wide range of topics, whether connected to British party politics or comparable upheavals abroad.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was at his most visible during the decade or so from 1975 onward. That period encompassed the premiere of \u201cComedians\u201d in Nottingham, England, in 1975, as well as its New York premiere in 1976 \u2014 it was his only Broadway play \u2014 and his lone foray into Hollywood, as a collaborator with Warren Beatty on his screenplay for the much-admired movie \u201cReds\u201d (1981).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His plays granted <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1989\/07\/12\/obituaries\/olivier-is-dead-after-6-decade-acting-career.html\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Laurence Olivier<\/a> his last stage role, in the National Theater premiere of \u201cThe Party\u201d (1973) \u2014 an anatomy of the British left set against the backdrop of the 1968 political tumult in Paris \u2014 and offered early opportunities for budding talents like Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony for \u201cComedians,\u201d and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred in the American and British premieres of the play \u201cReal Dreams\u201d in the 1980s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cComedians,\u201d set in Manchester among the hopefuls in a night comedy class, has had various notable revivals over the years \u2014 among them a 2003 Off Broadway production, with Ra\u00fal Esparza inheriting Mr. Pryce\u2019s career-defining role, and one at London\u2019s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, David Dawson playing the same role.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Pryce\u2019s performance as the angry, class-conscious Gethin Price, who has shorn his hair in a symbolic gesture, caused a sensation first in Nottingham and London then, finally, in New York, where Mr. Pryce, then 29, took the town playing Mr. Griffiths\u2019s bilious skinhead, who also happens to be an amateur comic. (Mr. Pryce\u2019s performance lives on in a 1979 version filmed for the BBC.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThere were a few hiccups along the way trying to relate a shaven-headed Manchester United supporter to a New York audience,\u201d Mr. Pryce said in a phone interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But the play, Mr. Pryce said, \u201cestablished me in America; getting the Tony\u201d \u2014 in 1977 \u2014 \u201cand having a foothold there meant I could go backwards and forwards, which I have done all my life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Pryce\u2019s memories of that time include looking on as Mr. Griffiths was \u201cwooed and seduced,\u201d he said, by Mr. Beatty, who had alighted upon Mr. Griffiths to write the screenplay for \u201cReds,\u201d Mr. Beatty\u2019s historical film epic about the Harvard-educated socialist activist and author John Reed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cPolitically, they were like-minded,\u201d Mr. Pryce said of Mr. Beatty and Mr. Griffiths. \u201cI think Trevor saw the film as a way of getting a bigger audience for his beliefs and thoughts, though I don\u2019t think he came out of it happily, shall we say.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">That was very much confirmed in a 2007 Vanity Fair article about the making of \u201cReds.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe atmosphere around us was poisonous, terrible,\u201d Mr. Griffiths told Peter Biskind, the author of the article. \u201cIt was messy, it was vile and it was foulmouthed on both sides.\u201d As a result, Mr. Griffiths departed the very film for which he went on to share a 1982 Oscar nomination for original screenplay with Mr. Beatty \u2014 whose own Academy Award acceptance speech that year, when he won for best director, made no mention of his onetime colleague.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4, 1935, into a working-class family in Manchester: His father, Ernest, cleaned vats in an acid-making factory, and his mother, Annie, was a bus conductor. Britain\u2019s Education Act of 1944 broadened access to good schools, which in an instant changed his horizons. He studied English at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1955, and then worked as a teacher and an education officer for the BBC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">From the 1970s onward, he coupled writing for the theater with larger-scale work for television. An early play, \u201cOccupations,\u201d had several runs before it was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a young Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley among the cast. Its focus on the Italian Marxist writer and theorist Antonio Gramsci was characteristic of Mr. Griffiths\u2019s interest in revolutions of all stripes \u2014 a self-appointed playwright-provocateur, he once said he was keen \u201cto teach through entertainment.\u201d (The play was seen briefly Off Broadway in 1982.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In \u201cThe Party,\u201d Laurence Olivier played John Tagg, a Glaswegian Trotskyite who finds himself at an upscale London dinner party discussing the other meaning of that word \u2014 party politics. \u201cIt was a fantastic thing to see him hold the stage with a Marxist lecture for 20 minutes,\u201d the Tony Award-winning playwright David Edgar, who saw the performance, said in an interview.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Griffiths\u2019s original work for TV included \u201cThrough the Night\u201d (1975), prompted by his wife Janice\u2019s experience with breast cancer, and \u201cBill Brand\u201d (1976), an 11-part series covering a year in the life of a Labour Party member of Parliament. \u201cCountry\u201d (1981) was a family drama influenced by Mr. Griffiths\u2019s previous adaptation of Chekhov\u2019s \u201cThe Cherry Orchard\u201d and was screened as part of \u201cPlay for Today,\u201d the influential BBC series devoted to socially engaged new writing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He wrote the 1986 Ken Loach film \u201cFatherland,\u201d about a German singer-songwriter, and had long hoped to get a film made with <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/08\/25\/arts\/richard-attenborough-actor-director-and-giant-of-british-cinema-dies-at-90.html\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Richard Attenborough<\/a> about the American revolutionary Thomas Paine; that material instead ended up in a 2009 play, \u201cA New World,\u201d at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe, in which John Light played the passionate pamphleteer.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Griffiths\u2019s adaptations included \u201cSons and Lovers\u201d (1981), a six-part version for the BBC of the D.H. Lawrence novel, and \u201cPiano,\u201d a 1990 play for the National Theater adapted from a 1977 Russian film that itself takes as its source the early Chekhov play \u201cPlatonov.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The London-based Turkish director Mehmet Ergen directed the Turkish premiere of \u201cPiano\u201d in Istanbul in 2010, as well as the London stage premiere of Mr. Griffiths\u2019s \u201cCherry Orchard,\u201d which had until then been seen only regionally and on TV.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">That Chekhov revival ran at Mr. Ergen\u2019s own Arcola Theater in East London in 2017 and turned out to be the last major staging during Mr. Griffiths\u2019s lifetime of one of his plays in London.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In an interview, Mr. Ergen spoke affectionately of Mr. Griffiths. In his later years, he said, Mr. Griffiths was \u201cstill thinking that art played a particular role in social change: Everything was political for him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Or, as Mr. Griffiths himself put it in a 2008 talk at the University of Manchester, his alma mater, with regard to the impetus for societal awareness and improvement that was always present within him: \u201cAn army of principle will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. It will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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 by his second wife, Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, whom he married in 1992.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/04\/09\/theater\/trevor-griffiths-dead.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist writer for stage and screen most widely known for his play &ldquo;Comedians,&rdquo; which was staged<br \/><button class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/trevor-griffiths-marxist-writer-for-stage-and-screen-dies-at-88\/09\/04\/2024\/\">Read More &rsaquo;<\/a><\/button><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}