Trevor Griffiths (4 April 1935 – 29 March 2024) was an English dramatist.
Early life
Born in Ancoats, Manchester and brought up as a Roman Catholic by his mother, Annie, a bus conductor and father, Ernest, who worked in a factory. He attended St. Bede's College before being accepted into Manchester University in 1952 to read English. He graduated in 1955. After a brief involvement with professional football and a year in national service, he became a teacher The play had been submitted to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) as early as 1964, but had then been rejected as being "too controversial". Following its premiere in Manchester the previous year, the eventual RSC production in 1971 of Occupations, Griffiths first full-length stage play, Influenced by the experience of his wife, the latter is concerned with a woman's treatment for breast cancer. He developed a series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand, which was first shown by ITV in the summer of 1976.
Despite his considerable success in the theatre, he said of his work as a television dramatist in 1976: "I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television... [t]hat if for every Sweeney that went out, a Bill Brand went out, there would be a real struggle for the popular imagination... [a]nd people would be free to make liberating choices about where reality lies."
In the meantime, Griffiths had continued to write for the theatre with Comedians commissioned by the Nottingham Playhouse. The premiere production of the play was directed by Richard Eyre, then artistic director of the Nottingham theatre, and was first performed on 20 February 1975. Comedians is set in a Manchester night-school, where a group of budding comics gather for a final briefing before performing to an agent from London. The play is set in real time, i.e. as the real time is 7.27, the clock on the wall of the school room also says 7.27. It subsequently transferred to Broadway, and was later adapted for television by Eyre while he was responsible for Play for Today.
1980s
Griffiths' reputation at the time was such that Warren Beatty asked him to write a screenplay for a project about the US revolutionary John Reed, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (1981), but Griffiths departed from the project before the script was completed and estimated that he had written only 45% of the script for the finished film. He created a screen adaptation in 1981 for D.H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers and in 1990, Piano, a stage version of a 1977 film itself based on Anton Chekov's play, Platonov. In 2009 he completed his last play, A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine.
Griffiths participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, for which he wrote a piece based on the book of Habakkuk from the King James Bible.
Personal life and death
In 1960, Griffiths married Janice Stansfield; the couple had three children and were married until her death in an aviation accident in Cuba in 1977.