Theatre Plays Two [Paperback]

TREVOR GRIFFITHS - THEATRE PLAYS, Volumes 1 and 11

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.

What a joy this lovely new collection of Trevor Griffiths' writing for the stage is.The plays are exciting, absorbing and surprisingly easy to read. They do, however, demand to be paid serious attention.

The themes Griffiths covers are huge: they include sexual power [Apricots], the state-party v the individual{Thermidor], revolutionary politics [Occupations, The Party, Real Dreams], racism [Oi for England], war [The Gulf Between Us, Camel Station], the role and nature of comedy [Comedians].

The plays are well structured and beautifully crafted: Griffiths roots characters and events in detailed stage directions - written in a sort of impressionistic, poetic language - which make the plays read almost like novels and help us readers to produce the plays in our heads; the use of language is at times breathtaking ['the future lies in an alley, its throat slit', from Who Shall Be Happy...?]; the humour is both biting and bawdy [Comedians on Broadway was dubbed 'the dirtiest play in New York']. The social and political analysis is clinical but there is an underlying thread of hope and belief in the creative potential of humankind.

This is a writer who writes from the heart as well as the head, with an intellectual rigour and humanity that are increasingly hard to find. If you love theatre, long for serious debate of serious issues and care for the democratic future of our society, these plays are for you. Griffiths doesn't rant or propgandise; he treats his readers/audience with respect and invites us to join him in his search for truth.

Romy Clark, Lancaster.

Theatre Plays One

Theatre Plays Two By Trevor Griffiths

I make no attempt at critical analysis of this writers work, its been done a plenty by better qualified than I.

I enjoy reading good plays by good writers and in my humble opinion ,they come no better on both counts.

After publication last year of the brilliant "These are the Times" A life of Tom Paine ,

Spokesman Books have produced a further fifteen of Trevor Griffiths's theatre plays in two volumes.

Simply titled Theatre Plays One and Two, they cover a range of his work from the sinister Kafkaesque

`Wages of Thin' from 1969 to "Camel Station" from 2006, worked around a shaggy -camel story.

In `Wages', Thin , a seemingly typical British salary man calls at a public convenience to be confronted by two `policemen' who promptly accuse him of the murder a body in the cubicle. The script is a masterpiece of menace and word juggling full of rhythms and sidesteps as `Inspector One' and his associate and heavy `Two' ,in an apparent attempt to extract a confession proceed to peel Thins life like an onion .

Included are the powerful and possibly most familiar "Comedians" and what I personally regard as one of his best "The Gulf between Us" . There is a gem of a Bush damning speech by a woman Dr Aziz as the burned bodies of children are extracted from the missile hit ruins of a crèche, as relevant to the present watch of son as to that of father in 1991.

It these times of gutless, ratings - driven tabloid television and safety first theatre, a challenging piece of drama is a rarity. Reading a decent script is the next best thing and these two books provide it in spades.

So for a change ,if you love language and even if you are new to the work of Trevor Griffiths, back burner the Bennett, pause the Pinter and grab the geminate Griffiths. Its all there and all here.

Sam Porter