Trevor Griffiths, Marxist Writer for Stage and Screen, Dies at 88

Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist author for stage and display screen most generally recognized for his play “Comedians,” which was staged in London and on Broadway, died on March 29 at his dwelling 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 non-public and expressed that affinity throughout a variety of matters, whether or not linked to British social gathering politics or comparable upheavals overseas.

He was at his most seen throughout 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 Nationwide Theater premiere of “The Social gathering” (1973) — an anatomy of the British left set towards the backdrop of the 1968 political tumult in Paris — and supplied alternatives for budding abilities. Amongst them had been Jonathan Pryce, who gained a Tony for “Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred within the American and British premieres of the Griffiths play “Actual Desires” within the Eighties.

“Comedians,” set in Manchester among the many hopefuls in an evening comedy class, has had notable revivals through the years, together with a 2003 Off Broadway manufacturing, with Raúl Esparza inheriting Mr. Pryce’s career-defining function, and one at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, with David Dawson enjoying the identical function.

Mr. Pryce’s efficiency because the offended, class-conscious Gethin Worth, who has shorn his hair in a symbolic gesture, induced a sensation first in Nottingham and London after which in New York, the place Mr. Pryce, at 29, took the city enjoying Mr. Griffiths’s bilious skinhead, who additionally occurs to be an novice comedian. (Mr. Pryce’s efficiency lives on in a 1979 model filmed for the BBC.)

“There have been a couple of hiccups alongside the way in which making an attempt to narrate a shaven-headed Manchester United supporter to a New York viewers,” Mr. Pryce mentioned in a cellphone interview.

However the play, he 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 trying 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 writer 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 means of getting an even bigger viewers for his beliefs and ideas, although I don’t assume he got here out of it fortunately, shall we embrace.”

That was very a lot confirmed in a 2007 Vainness Truthful article concerning the making of “Reds.”

“The environment round us was toxic, horrible,” Mr. Griffiths informed Peter Biskind, the writer of the article. “It was messy, it was vile and it was foulmouthed on each side.” Because of this, Mr. Griffiths departed the very movie for which he went on to share a 1982 Oscar nomination for unique screenplay with Mr. Beatty — whose personal Academy Award acceptance speech that 12 months, when he gained 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 unit, and his mom, Annie, was a bus conductor. Britain’s Schooling Act of 1944 broadened entry to good colleges, which straight away modified his horizons. He studied English on the College of Manchester, graduating in 1955, after which labored as a trainer and an training officer for the BBC.

From the Seventies onward, Mr. Griffiths 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 Firm, with a younger Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley within the 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 means of leisure.” (The play was seen briefly Off Broadway in 1982.)

In “The Social gathering,” Laurence Olivier performed John Tagg, a Glaswegian Trotskyist who finds himself at an upscale London feast discussing the opposite that means of that phrase — social gathering politics. “It was a incredible 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 unique work for TV included “By way of the Evening” (1975), prompted by his spouse Janice’s expertise with breast most cancers, and “Invoice Model” (1976), an 11-part collection overlaying a 12 months within the lifetime of a Labour Social gathering member of Parliament. “Nation” (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 Right now,” the influential BBC collection 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 an alternative ended up in a 2009 play, “A New World,” at Shakespeare’s Globe, wherein John Gentle performed the passionate pamphleteer.

Mr. Griffiths’s diversifications 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 Nationwide 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 considered one of his performs in London.

He married Janice Stansfield in 1960; she died in a airplane crash in 1977. He’s survived by their three youngsters, Sian, Emma and Joss, and by his second spouse, Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, whom he married in 1992.

In an interview, Mr. Ergen spoke affectionately of Mr. Griffiths. In his later years, he mentioned, Mr. Griffiths was “nonetheless pondering that artwork performed a specific function in social change: Every little thing was political for him.”

Or, as Mr. Griffiths himself put it in a 2008 discuss on the College of Manchester, his alma mater, with regard to the impetus for societal consciousness and enchancment that was all the time current inside him: “A military of precept will penetrate the place a military of troopers can not. It is going to march on the horizon of the world, and it’ll conquer.”