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Reviews469 extent) social life. It also covers the subject ofsymbolic display and legitimation ofpower very succinctly. It is less clear, however, whether its method advances the analysis of any of these topics much beyond the boundaries it had already reached. Garrett Fagan The Pennsylvania State University Stanton Garner Jr. Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History. Theory/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. vi + 317. $49.50. Stanton Garner's book provides a thoroughly researched, carefully articulated, and timely look at a playwright whose politically committed work for stage, film, and television over the last thirty years has made him one of the most successful and respected socialist playwrights writing in Britain today. Like many writers of his generation, Trevor Griffiths was actively involved in the New Left movement of the early sixties and an articulate presence during the alternative theater movement of the seventies. Yet while others were making waves with experimental work on the aesthetic fringe, Griffiths was developing his own brand of critical realism for film and television—"strategically penetrating" more culturally dominant forms of entertainment to reach the widest possible audience. As Garner notes, Griffiths's working-class background , and the "educations" provided by a decade ofsocial activism in Britain , influenced Griffiths's choice of form and subject matter, including his intense personal engagement with the history, politics, and psychology of the Left. Garner's book does not, however, offer the familiar summaries of postwar British theater. The focus of this book is on Griffiths's own success as playwright and screenwriter, one now capable of voicing the contradictions and possibilities of the current historical moment because ofthe subtlety, intelligence , and flexibility of his politically informed dramatic practice. Despite the fact that most ofhis work has been published, Griffiths is still most well known among U.S. theater scholars as author of 77ie Party, written in 1972 forthe NationalTheatre, and Comedians ( 1974), one ofthe most heavily read, produced, and translated British plays ofthe decade. More recently, however , Griffiths has regained critical attention with The GulfBetween Us: Or, the Truth and other Fictions (1992), a moving political response to the Gulf War; Thatcher's Children (1993), his portrait of the eighties' generation; and 470Comparative Drama Hope in the Year Two, a play using Danton's death to explore the possibility of hope in the face of revolutionary failure. Garner's book is timely and important for American theater scholars, for not only does he analyze Griffiths's early and lesser-known plays, but, spending equal time with plays and series produced for television and film, he notes in the process just how important the latter is for understanding the development and significance of Griffiths's most recent work. Garner also makes good use of the rich archive of unpublished material collected at the British Film Institute and personal interviews with the author. The resulting "history" offers a more complete portrait of Griffiths's literary career than anything published to date. Writing a literary-historical account of a playwright who usually has several projects going at once, in different mediums, and with varying degrees of control over the final product, presents an organizational challenge that Garner handles well. The book maintains a clear linear chronology, which is important for a political playwright whose work is always, at some level, a response to the present. Moreover, Garner uses Griffiths's own intellectual interests —in the historical analysis ofpolitical situations, in the limits and necessity of individual agency, and in the possibilities of realism for a postmodern theater practice—to shape his material and provide connections across works in different media. An astute critic, Garner is careful to treat individual works on their own merits. His evenhandedjudgments help to circumvent the pattern so typical ofliterary biography in which early plays are inevitably portrayed as undeveloped or uneven compared to later, more complex and interestingwork. Nevertheless, the book's argument gains strength as it moves forward, especially as Garner recovers Griffiths's less public work ofthe eighties to show clear influences on the latest and least analyzed plays. Garner himself stakes out a claim for the importance ofrevisiting a playwright who, for many, is more associated with the energy...

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