Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and openly Marxist writer on stage and screen best known for his play The Comedian, which ran in London and on Broadway, died March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. He was 88 years old.
His agent Nicki Stoddart said the cause was heart failure.
An important figure on the British left, Mr. Griffith combined the political and the personal, and expressed those similarities across a wide range of topics, whether related to British party politics or similar upheavals abroad.
He was the most visible figure for about 10 years, starting in 1975. During that period, in Nottingham, England in 1975 <코미디언>It premiered, including the 1976 New York premiere (his only Broadway play), and also marked his only foray into Hollywood, collaborating with Warren Beatty on the screenplay. The much-loved movie ‘Reds’ (1981).
His plays gave Laurence Olivier his final stage role in the National Theater premiere of 'The Party' (1973), a dissection of the British left set against the backdrop of the political upheaval in Paris in 1968, and provided early opportunities for emerging talents such as I did. Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony Award for 'The Comedian', and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who appeared in the US and UK premieres of the 1980s play 'Real Dreams'.
One of the up-and-comers of Manchester-based night comedy classes, “The Comedians” has had a variety of noteworthy revivals over the years. Among them was the 2003 Off-Broadway production in which Raúl Esparza played Mr. It inherited Pryce's career-defining role, and one was produced at the Lyric in London. In 2009, Hammersmith also took on David Dawson in the same role.
Price's performance as the angry, class-conscious Gethin Price, with his shaved head in a symbolic gesture, caused a sensation, first in Nottingham and London, and finally in New York. This is the town where Mr. Griffith plays the bile skinhead, who is also an amateur comic. (Mr Pryce's performance survives in the 1979 version filmed for the BBC.)
“There were some challenges in associating a Manchester United supporter with a shaved head with a New York audience,” Mr. Price said in a phone interview.
But Mr. Price said the play “made me settle in America. I won a Tony in 1977 and having a foothold there meant I could go back and forth, and I’ve done that my whole life.”
Mr. Price's memories of that time include watching Mr. Beatty being “wooed and seduced” by Mr. Griffith, who had come to him to write the screenplay for Mr. Beatty's historical film, “Reds.” An epic poem about the Harvard-educated socialist activist and author John Reed.
“Politically they were on the same page,” Mr. Pryce said of Mr. Beatty and Mr. Griffiths. “I think Trevor saw this film as a way to share his beliefs and ideas with a wider audience. But I don’t think he came out of this film happy.”
This was heavily confirmed in a 2007 Vanity Fair article about the making of “Reds.”
“The atmosphere around us was toxic and terrible,” Griffiths told the article’s author, Peter Biskind. “It was dirty, it was evil, and both sides were foul-mouthed.” As a result, Mr. Griffith made a film with Mr. Beatty that was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1982. Mr. Beatty made no comment in his Academy Awards acceptance speech that year when he accepted the award for Best Director. His one-time colleague.
Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4, 1935, into a working-class family in Manchester. His father, Ernest, worked as a barrel cleaner at an acid manufacturing plant, and his mother, Annie, was a bus conductor. The 1944 British Education Act expanded access to good schools, which immediately changed his outlook. 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 large-scale work for television. His early play 'Occupations' was performed several times, starring a young Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley, before being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. A focus on the Italian Marxist writer and theorist Antonio Gramsci was a hallmark of Mr. Griffith's interest in revolutions of all kinds. The self-described playwright and provocateur once said he wanted to “teach through entertainment.” (The play ran briefly off-Broadway in 1982.)
In “The Party,” Laurence Olivier plays John Tagg, a Trotskyist from Glasgow who discusses party politics, another meaning of the word, at a posh dinner party in London. Tony Award-winning playwright David Edgar, who saw the performance, said in an interview, “It was fantastic to see him go on stage and give a 20-minute Marxist lecture.”
Griffiths' original work for television included “Through the Night” (1975), prompted by his wife Janice's experience with breast cancer, and “Bill Brand” (1976), an 11-part series about a year in the Labor Party. member of Congress. “Country” (1981), a family drama influenced by Mr. Griffith’s previous adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” was part of “Play of the Day,” an influential BBC series devoted to new, socially engaged writing. It was screened.
He wrote the 1986 Ken Loach film “Fatherland,” about the German singer-songwriter, and had long hoped to make a film with Richard Attenborough about American revolutionary Thomas Paine. Instead, the material ended up in the play “A New World,” which opened at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2009, in which John Light played a passionate pamphleteer.
Mr. Griffith's adaptations include “Sons and Lovers” (1981), a six-part BBC version of D.H. Lawrence's novel, and the 1990 play “The Piano” at the National Theater, adapted from a 1977 Russian film. The source is Chekhov's early play “Platonov.”
London-based Turkish director Mehmet Ergen directed the Turkish premiere of “The Piano” in Istanbul in 2010 and the London stage premiere of Mr. Griffith's “The Cherry Orchard,” which until then had only been seen locally and on television. Directed.
That Chekhov revival opened at Mr. Ergen's Arcola Theater in east London in 2017 and turned out to be the last major stage performance of one of Mr. Griffith's plays in London during his lifetime.
In the interview, Mr. Ergen spoke fondly of Mr. Griffiths. Even in his later years, he said, Mr. Griffith “still thought that art had a special role to play in social change. For him, everything was political.”
Or, as Mr. Griffith himself expressed in a 2008 lecture at his alma mater, the University of Manchester, the drive for social awareness and improvement that has always existed within him: “The army of principle will infiltrate where the army infiltrates. Soldiers cannot. It will advance to the horizon of the world and conquer it.”
Mr. Griffith married Janice Stansfield in 1960. She died in a plane crash in 1977. He is survived by his three children, Sian, Emma and Joss, and by his second wife, Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, whom he married in 1992.