Trevor Griffiths, socialist playwright who embraced television to ‘cut across the classes’ – obituary

Trevor Griffiths, the stage and television playwright, who has died aged 88, was one of the most original, intelligent and controversial exponents of socialism in the post-war British theatre.

A key figure in the debate over how to make Left-wing ideals work within a capitalist society, Griffiths was an unrepentant Marxist who also became one of the foremost writers about class in television plays, his powers of analysis, linguistic wit and comic ambiguity winning him wide respect.

Griffiths had two main stage successes. In The Party (1973), Left-wing intellectuals and non-intellectuals sympathetic to the student revolutionaries of the 1968 événements in France come together to discuss, in a Kensington drawing room, why British sympathisers did to nothing to help.

The play provided Laurence Olivier with his last stage role at the National Theatre. He had expected it to be Shakespearean, but his wife, the actress Joan Plowright, had said: “If you do anything as predictable as King Lear, I’ll kill you. Do something modern, for heaven’s sake. Give one of your younger contemporaries a showing.”

Olivier played a Glaswegian Trotskyite with a 20-minute speech which took four months to learn; but he was drawn to the play by its lack of political bias, and nothing came more trippingly off the 66-year-old actor’s tongue than a line about British socialists biting the hand that fed them while being careful not to bite it off.

Comedians (1975) met with the most general acclaim. Masquerading as a comedy about provincial evening classes for aspiring stand-up comics, this fierce and funny play was at heart a study of revolutionary political action. Set in a Manchester school room where builders, dockers, milkmen and labourers learn that humour is a deadly serious business, involving anger, pain and truth, it showed ways of engineering laughter out of sex, racial prejudice and physical disabilities.

Its original staging at Nottingham and the Old Vic, when it still housed the National Theatre, yielded two superb performances, one from Jonathan Pryce as the most sinister and menacing (and least comic) of the apprentices, the other from a true veteran of the variety halls, Jimmy Jewel, of the former double-act Jewel and Warriss.

But before long Griffiths concluded that in the theatre he was addressing only the middle classes or the politically converted. So he turned instead to television because it “cuts across the classes”. Thus began what he called his “strategic penetration of the central channel of communication”.

The BBC commissioned him to write Such Impossibilities as part of its 1972-73 series The Edwardians, but it was never filmed, ostensibly on grounds of cost but more probably for its Marxist view of the violence in a Liverpool transport strike of 1911. In his 1974 Play for Today, All Good Men, about a retiring renegade MP, Griffiths wore his political convictions more lightly. His finest achievement on the small screen was the 1976 13-part socialist soap opera, Bill Brand, with its account of the career of a Labour MP questioning the parliamentary road to socialism and the role of the Labour Party.

He also wrote an instalment of the BBC’s epic 1974 Falls of Eagles series, a 13-part drama telling the history of Europe from 1848 to 1914. The episode by Griffiths, Absolute Beginners, was set in 1903, and depicted Lenin (played by Patrick Stewart), Trotsky (Michael Kitchen) and the emergence of the Bolshevik party.

The television piece which Griffiths described as “without question... my best known”, however, was his 1975 Play for Today, Through the Night, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and featuring Alison Steadman as a young working-class woman who enters hospital for a routine cancer test and awakes to find a breast removed. It attracted an audience of about 11 million and provoked a national debate about the treatment of mastectomy patients.

His other television work extended from single plays, including Oi for England for Central Television (1982), about youth unemployment in cities, and The Last Place on Earth (also Central, 1985), about Scott of the Antarctic and the construction of national myths, to adaptations of books such as Sons and Lovers (BBC, 1981) and contributions to series including Adam Smith and Dr Finlay’s Casebook.

Among his feature-film screenplays was Reds (1981), co-written with Warren Beatty, who also directed it and starred as the American journalist John Reed, who becomes entangled in Russia’s October Revolution. The film went on to win three Oscars and was nominated for nine others, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Griffiths also wrote Fatherland (1987), directed by Ken Loach, about the partition of post-war Germany, in which a son searches for his father who left the German Democratic Republic 30 years earlier.

If Griffiths never wrote without political purpose, at least his sense of psychological nuance and of characterisation kept his writing dramatically palatable. “I have to work with the popular imagination,” he said. “I am not interested in talking to 38 university graduates in a cellar in Soho. My sort of writing isn’t about ego-massage. It’s about impact and penetration.”

Of Welsh and Irish descent, Trevor Griffiths was born in Manchester on April 4 1935, the son of a chemical process worker and a bus conductress. One of the first generation of working-class children to benefit from the 1944 Education Act, he attended St Bede’s College and Manchester University where he read English.

After two years’ detested National Service in the Army, he became a teacher of English and games at a private school at Oldham. He also lectured in liberal studies at Stockport Technical College, co-edited Labour’s Northern Voice and was series editor for the Workers’ Northern Publishing Society before in 1965 joining the BBC at Leeds for seven years as further education officer.

After his one-act play, The Wages of Sin, was performed at Manchester in 1969, his first full-length work, Occupations, created enough of a stir at Granada’s small stage for new writers that the Royal Shakespeare Company produced it in 1971 at its London experimental base, The Place, Euston.

Considered by some critics dramatically finer than The Party, Occupations evoked the conflict in 1920s Italy between capital and labour, and between two types of communist, personified by the Italian workers’ leader, Gramsci (played in the RSC production by Ben Kingsley), and Kabak (played by Patrick Stewart), a Soviet agent who tried to push a strike by workers at Fiat into full-scale revolution.

Two one-act plays, Apricots and Thermidor (Edinburgh Festival, 1971), were followed by a collaboration with David Hare, Stephen Poliakoff, Snoo Wilson and others on the play Lay-By (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1971). The partly autobiographical one-act Sam, Sam (Open Space, 1972) contrasted the behaviour of two brothers, one loyal to his working-class background, the other rising above it by marriage, wondering which was the happier.

Then came his two big stage successes The Party (Old Vic, 1973) and Comedians (Nottingham Playhouse and Old Vic, 1975; Wyndham’s, 1976; and New York). An all-women version of Comedians was staged successfully in Liverpool in 1987.

Griffiths collaborated with Howard Brenton, Ken Campbell and David Hare on Deeds (Nottingham Playhouse, 1978) and in 1982 adapted his television play Oi for England for the Royal Court Upstairs.

In 1984 the British Film Institute devoted a season to his television plays, including another Play for Today, Country (1981), directed by Richard Eyre and starring Edward Fox. Shot entirely on location, it looked at Labour’s landslide victory of 1945 from the perspective of an upper-class family living in a mansion in Kent.

His later stage plays included Real Dreams (1986), first staged in the US (with a young Kevin Spacey), about a commune of middle-class American students in the late 1960s and their fighting alliance with Puerto Rican workers; The Gulf Between Us (West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1992), about the Middle East conflict; Thatcher’s Children (Bristol Old Vic, 1993); and A New World (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2009), about Thomas Paine, an adaptation of a never-used screenplay originally commissioned for the BBC by David Attenborough.

In 1997 he was commissioned by the BBC to write Food for Ravens, a TV film starring Brian Cox and Sinéad Cusack, to mark the centenary of Aneurin Bevan’s birth, but the BBC tried to restrict the broadcast – the only film he ever directed, and his most personal project – to Wales, eventually broadcasting it nationally on BBC Two just before midnight. “No trailer, no listing in Radio Times. No DVD,” he told The Independent. Even so, it won a Bafta.

Trevor Griffiths married, in 1960, Janice Elaine Stansfield, who died in 1977. They had a son and two daughters.

Trevor Griffiths, born April 4 1935, died March 29 2024

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