Trevor Griffiths Obituary, Death Cause – Trevor Griffiths, who passed away at the age of 88, was the most ardent and dedicated of all the political dramatists that appeared in Britain in the late 1960s. He was the most passionate and committed. In his capacity as a Marxist from Manchester, he carried his passion for dialectic to the stage. Additionally, he was a firm believer in the concept of “strategic penetration” through the citadels of culture.
He was successful in that plays such as “The Party” and “Comdians” were picked up by the National Theatre; “Bill Brand,” an eleven-part series about the frustrations of parliamentary democracy, was shown on ITV; and his screenplay for “Reds,” which was co-authored with Warren Beatty and was based on John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” became a Hollywood film that won an Academy Award.
If there was one thing that could be said to have been the driving force behind Griffiths’s work, it would be the struggle between revolutionary idealism and reformist approach to life. Occupations, which was performed for the first time at the Manchester Stables in 1970 and was subsequently picked up by the Royal Shakespeare Company for a production starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley, was one of the early works that used this. Kabak, a businesslike Comintern delegate, and Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian firebrand promoting shop-floor soviets, have a head-on clash in the play, which takes place in Turin in 1920, at a time when every engineering factory in northern Italy had been taken over by the workers.
The drama is set in the year 1920. In the play The Party, which was performed by the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1973 and served as the reason for Laurence Olivier’s departure from the British stage, Griffiths’s faith in a drama of conflict and debate was seen to even greater effect. The Party was a play that was staged by the National Theatre.
Olivier performed the role of a resolute Glaswegian Trotskyite who took part in a conversation in a dining table about the necessity of revolutionary change in Britain and the factors that contributed to its failure. It was Olivier’s character who came up with the play’s most vicious attack on left-wing intellectuals: “You enjoy biting the hand that feeds you but you’ll never bite it off.” The comments were made by an LSE lecturer and an itinerant dramatist, both of whom were based on the playwright David Mercer. Both of these individuals gave twenty-minute speeches in which they expressed their points of view.
