Creativity and Commitment in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians

Creativity and Commitment in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians AUSTIN E. QUIGLEY Trevor Griffiths began writing plays in the mid nineteen-sixties, had a play performed for the first time on stage in 1969, and became a full-time writer in 1972. He lost the first three plays he wrote, but does recall their general concerns: "one about the anny, one about ahomosexual, one about me and our kid.'" A fourth play, Love Maniac, "about a guy who really tries to love kids in the teaching of them ... ,'" was written for television in 1967, but was performed, instead, on radio. His fifth play, The Wages of Thin, staged in Manchester in [969, was set in a public lavatory, partly as a result of a challenge Griffiths offered himselfto see whether he could, indeed, write a play set in such a location. Subsequent plays for the theatre, television, and radio (The Big House [1969] , Occupations [1970], Apricots [197[]' Thermidor [1971], Sam Sam [1972], The Party [1973], All Good Men [1974], Absolute Beginners [1974], Comedians [1975], Through the Night [1975])3 have established Griffiths's reputation as an important playwright. The degree and nature of that importance remain, at this point, a matter for conjecture and debate. In Griffiths's case, the issue is made more complicated by his extensive interest in dramatising political issues. Such an interest can invite, in England, premature judgement on political grounds alone, and, in the United States, a degree of incomprehension. The risk of conflict between political and aesthetic criteria, which political plays prompt audiences simultaneously to apply, is not easily avoided. Such conflict emerges intermittently in Itzin's Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. Her major claim is that "the significant British theatre of 1968- 78 was primarily theatre of political change."4 She readily acknowledges that this claim puts the work of David Storey, Peter Shaffer, John Osborne, Peter Nichols, Simon Gray, and Harold Pinter outside of her terms of reference, and that it gives only marginal recognition to the work of Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, and David 405 Rudkin. If the work of such dramatists is not to be included in the category of "significant British theatre of 1968-78," we may well begin to wonder about the criteria, political or aesthetic, by which "significance" is assigned to plays. Itzin is nevertheless right to acknowledge, and right to seek to help us understand and appreciate, "the growth of the socialist theatre movement in Britain.'" She is also right to ask whether political theatre is primarily political or primarily theatre, and whether there are appropriate means ofreconciling the two. Griffiths has spoken at some length in interviews about the dilemma he has confronted in his personal life in trying to reconcile his left-wing politics with his seemingly bourgeois professional career. This kind of conflict is explored repeatedly in such plays as Occupations, Sam Sam, The Party, and All Good Men, and it has surfaced with some regularity in left-wing criticism ofhis plays: " ... I get tons of shit lowered on the plays quite regularly by Workers Press or Socialist Worker or Tribune or whatever.... What was it Corin Redgrave said? Oh yes he described me as 'paddling in the shallows of revolutionary practice' .,,6 To the revolutionary left, Griffiths's plays either promote the revolution or they do not, and there is little more to be said about the writing of successful plays. In such a context, the creation ofenduring works oftheatrical art becomes decidedly problematic in nature, and Griffiths is committed enough to left-wing politics to worry about becoming a creature of the theatre: '" don't feel proud of the fact that I get enjoyment out of writing for the theatre and yet I can't lock into what is particularly efficacious about it. And I don't at all. Because I'm Northern, working-class and puritan by origin anyway, and development to some extent,' feel rather guilty... . "7 Griffiths has sought to resolve the dilemma, in part, by writing for television (the medium of the masses) and not just for the theatre (the medium of the middle and upper classes). He argues that this is the...