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Trevor Griffiths - Theatre Plays I and II
Spokesman
£15 each
Dateline: 8th April, 2007
Twenty odd years ago, fuelled by whacky tobaccy, I climbed a Welsh
hillside to a small cabin. The valley was home to sheep and drifting
columns of heavy rain. I wrapped myself in a quilt, sat in a deckchair
and read Uncle Vanya. I'd read it and other plays before, but
never like this. The play opened up, paced itself, revealed a production
and hinted at another hundred.
Since that wet Wednesday afternoon I've been sold on play scripts.
I'd rather read a script than a novel any day. Staging your own production,
in your head takes a lot of beating (exquisite sets, perfect lighting
and actors, dead and alive, queuing up for a part!)
Some playwrights give us good scripts, some give us scripts that read
well. As anyone who read his recently published screenplay, These
Are the Times , will eagerly testify - Trevor Griffiths gives us
both.
Thanks then to Spokesman for following up their publication of These
Are the Times with an elegantly produced two volume collection of
Griffiths' theatre plays from 1969 to 2006. Fifteen plays that have
provided great roles for many of our best actors, from Olivier to Spacey
to name but a couple of Old Vic habitués.
Here together for the first time are the celebrated works: Comedians,
Occupations, The Party and so on. Here also the magnificent
later works Piano, for example, based on Unfinished Piece
for a Mechanical Piano, a film based on the works of Chekhov by
Abashyan and Mikhalkov. And the savage bite of plays criminally neglected
and even despised by the cultural turncoats of the last two decades
- The Gulf Between Us, Thatcher's Children, Who Shall
Be Happy. Volume II ends with Camel Station, a brief, eloquent,
howl of despair at the slaughter of innocence and the perversion of
energy and idealism that is our bequest to the young of the world.
Read these plays for education, entertainment, intellectual or emotional
excitement. Read them to poke dying embers of idealism into flame. Read
them for whatever reason, you will be gratified.
And there is more, the two also read as a track through an artist's
working days. They speak of Griffiths' understanding of and facility
with the stage. And they allow us to appreciate his development as an
artist and intellectual.
There are only two scripts here that are new to me. The first two.
They are, without doubt, texts that many playwrights would have quietly
dropped from their collected works.
The first, The Wages of Thin, had a three night run at The Stable
Theatre Club, Manchester in 1969. It shows a mimetic ability - Griffiths
drives Pinter's tram well enough, but no question, it's Pinter's tram.
Then we have Sam Sam, scenes from the lives of working class
brothers - one stays home, the other powers through the education system.
A familiar story of the day (less frequent under Blair than in the days
of Churchill and Macmillan!). Sam Sam has a first act which draws
on a host of literary works, the second act is pure Osborne.
Nothing in these first two plays prepares the reader for the third
play: Occupations. In one quantum leap and a cry in his own voice,
our hero is up and away. Having read the first two plays, I decided
to just dip into Occupations and found myself some time later
rising to applaud with an imaginary audience.
Occupations is a dazzling portrait of the Italian activist and
theoretician Gramsci at the time of the occupation of the Fiat factory.
We are plunged into the turmoil of the head and heart of revolution,
a topic that will engage Griffiths overtly or covertly for the years
to come. First produced at The Stables in 1970, it was recognised as
a work of signal importance and produced by the RSC a year later.
For a few years the plays follow a gentle incline. Here are the distinctive,
driven texts that in the hands of a lesser writer would be overly didactic.
Plays that can leave an impression of heaviness (though revisiting them
now. there is a surprising show of light and humour to be found in them).
Mid Seventies sees an undisputed masterwork, Comedians: the
best play of the decade, according to Richard Eyre. Comedians
appears to release something in the writer. The later plays are still
cleanly chiselled and deeply moral and intelligent, but they are also,
well, playful! Here is a playwright who can do the stuff, seeing exactly
what more he can do and where it can take him. It is hard to read his
version of The Cherry Orchard without sensing Chekhov smashing out of
his grave and tap dancing his delight!
It is as if Griffiths' intensity of pity and despair finds a countor
balance. Humour is the Mae West that allows him to float. Even the dark
Who Shall Be Happy, which recounts the last days of Danton, has
the gallows humour of an innocent jailor playing 'Last Words' with the
condemned prisoner. And, as if to ram home the point, the sparse, elegaic
Camel Station is based on and around one joke - which serves
to intensify the heartbreak.
Be in no doubt, Spokesman have graced our culture with this two volume
collection. Let's hope that they now publish the collected TV plays
( Eyre, again: 'His TV plays were the best of the time, not excluding
Potter.') As the film scripts, what a gold mine, not only Reds
and Food for Ravens (disgracefully hidden away by the BBC) but
also, not surprisingly, there are other works like These Are the
Times that await significant investment and a Californian Enlightenment.
And when the whole lot are available to the public (for someday they
will be) pulsing beneath each script will be Gramsci's words: 'It is
a revolutionary duty to tell the truth.'
Considering the breadth and quality of his work, the Oscar nomination
and the Baftas, it is surely a dedication to, or entrapment by Gramsci's
rubric that has saved Griffiths the bother of telling the establishment
exactly where they can stuff the knighthood!
Ray Brown
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