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Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist author for stage and display screen most generally identified for his play “Comedians,” which was staged in London and on Broadway, died on March 29 at his house in Yorkshire, England. He was 88.
His agent, Nicki Stoddart, mentioned the trigger was coronary heart failure.
An essential determine on the English left, Mr. Griffiths conjoined the political with the private and expressed that affinity throughout a variety of subjects, whether or not related to British party politics or comparable upheavals overseas.
He was at his most seen in the course of the decade or so from 1975 onward. That interval encompassed the premiere of “Comedians” in Nottingham, England, in 1975, in addition to its New York premiere in 1976 — it was his solely Broadway play — and his lone foray into Hollywood, as a collaborator with Warren Beatty on his screenplay for the much-admired film “Reds” (1981).
His performs granted Laurence Olivier his final stage function, within the National Theater premiere of “The Party” (1973) — an anatomy of the British left set towards the backdrop of the 1968 political tumult in Paris — and provided early alternatives for budding skills like Jonathan Pryce, who received a Tony for “Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred within the American and British premieres of the play “Real Dreams” within the Nineteen Eighties.
“Comedians,” set in Manchester among the many hopefuls in an evening comedy class, has had varied notable revivals through the years — amongst them a 2003 Off Broadway manufacturing, with Raúl Esparza inheriting Mr. Pryce’s career-defining function, and one at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, David Dawson enjoying the identical function.
Mr. Pryce’s efficiency because the offended, class-conscious Gethin Price, who has shorn his hair in a symbolic gesture, brought on a sensation first in Nottingham and London then, lastly, in New York, the place Mr. Pryce, then 29, took the city enjoying Mr. Griffiths’s bilious skinhead, who additionally occurs to be an beginner comedian. (Mr. Pryce’s efficiency lives on in a 1979 model filmed for the BBC.)
“There had been a couple of hiccups alongside the best way making an attempt to narrate a shaven-headed Manchester United supporter to a New York viewers,” Mr. Pryce mentioned in a telephone interview.
But the play, Mr. Pryce mentioned, “established me in America; getting the Tony” — in 1977 — “and having a foothold there meant I might go backwards and forwards, which I’ve carried out all my life.”
Mr. Pryce’s recollections of that point embrace wanting on as Mr. Griffiths was “wooed and seduced,” he mentioned, by Mr. Beatty, who had alighted upon Mr. Griffiths to jot down the screenplay for “Reds,” Mr. Beatty’s historic movie epic concerning the Harvard-educated socialist activist and creator John Reed.
“Politically, they had been like-minded,” Mr. Pryce mentioned of Mr. Beatty and Mr. Griffiths. “I believe Trevor noticed the movie as a method of getting an even bigger viewers for his beliefs and ideas, although I don’t assume he got here out of it fortunately, let’s assume.”
That was very a lot confirmed in a 2007 Vanity Fair article concerning the making of “Reds.”
“The environment round us was toxic, horrible,” Mr. Griffiths instructed Peter Biskind, the creator of the article. “It was messy, it was vile and it was foulmouthed on either side.” As a end result, Mr. Griffiths departed the very movie for which he went on to share a 1982 Oscar nomination for authentic screenplay with Mr. Beatty — whose personal Academy Award acceptance speech that yr, when he received for finest director, made no point out of his onetime colleague.
Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4, 1935, right into a working-class household in Manchester: His father, Ernest, cleaned vats in an acid-making manufacturing facility, and his mom, Annie, was a bus conductor. Britain’s Education Act of 1944 broadened entry to good faculties, which instantly modified his horizons. He studied English on the University of Manchester, graduating in 1955, after which labored as a teacher and an training officer for the BBC.
From the Seventies onward, he coupled writing for the theater with larger-scale work for tv. An early play, “Occupations,” had a number of runs earlier than it was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a younger Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley among the many forged. Its give attention to the Italian Marxist author and theorist Antonio Gramsci was attribute of Mr. Griffiths’s curiosity in revolutions of all stripes — a self-appointed playwright-provocateur, he as soon as mentioned he was eager “to show by way of leisure.” (The play was seen briefly Off Broadway in 1982.)
In “The Party,” Laurence Olivier performed John Tagg, a Glaswegian Trotskyite who finds himself at an upscale London dinner party discussing the opposite that means of that phrase — party politics. “It was a improbable factor to see him maintain the stage with a Marxist lecture for 20 minutes,” the Tony Award-winning playwright David Edgar, who noticed the efficiency, mentioned in an interview.
Mr. Griffiths’s authentic work for TV included “Through the Night” (1975), prompted by his spouse Janice’s expertise with breast most cancers, and “Bill Brand” (1976), an 11-part sequence protecting a yr within the lifetime of a Labour Party member of Parliament. “Country” (1981) was a household drama influenced by Mr. Griffiths’s earlier adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and was screened as a part of “Play for Today,” the influential BBC sequence dedicated to socially engaged new writing.
He wrote the 1986 Ken Loach movie “Fatherland,” a couple of German singer-songwriter, and had lengthy hoped to get a movie made with Richard Attenborough concerning the American revolutionary Thomas Paine; that materials as a substitute ended up in a 2009 play, “A New World,” at Shakespeare’s Globe, through which John Light performed the passionate pamphleteer.
Mr. Griffiths’s variations included “Sons and Lovers” (1981), a six-part model for the BBC of the D.H. Lawrence novel, and “Piano,” a 1990 play for the National Theater tailored from a 1977 Russian movie that itself takes as its supply the early Chekhov play “Platonov.”
The London-based Turkish director Mehmet Ergen directed the Turkish premiere of “Piano” in Istanbul in 2010, in addition to the London stage premiere of Mr. Griffiths’s “Cherry Orchard,” which had till then been seen solely regionally and on TV.
That Chekhov revival ran at Mr. Ergen’s personal Arcola Theater in East London in 2017 and turned out to be the final main staging throughout Mr. Griffiths’s lifetime of one in every of his performs in London.
In an interview, Mr. Ergen spoke affectionately of Mr. Griffiths. In his later years, he mentioned, Mr. Griffiths was “nonetheless considering that artwork performed a selected function in social change: Everything was political for him.”
Or, as Mr. Griffiths himself put it in a 2008 discuss on the University of Manchester, his alma mater, with regard to the impetus for societal consciousness and enchancment that was all the time current inside him: “An military of precept will penetrate the place a military of troopers can not. It will march on the horizon of the world, and it’ll conquer.”
Mr. Griffiths married Janice Stansfield in 1960; she died in a airplane crash in 1977. He is survived by their three kids, Sian, Emma and Joss, and by his second spouse, Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, whom he married in 1992.
