Politics over the Gulf: Trevor Griffiths in the Nineties

Politics over the Gulf: Trevor Griffiths in the Nineties STANTON B. GARNER , JR. In a January 1992 interview with Douglas Kennedy of the Sunday Telegraph, Trevor Griffiths lamented the current state of British political theater: ''The social function of theater is dead - someone should call the priest and say last rites over the British theater,"1He has not been alone in his anger and concern. In a May 1988 symposium on the state of the theater in Thatcher's Britain, John McGrath observed, ''The number of new plays being done now is a third of what it was ten years ago. There's a real chance that within the next five years they will disappear completely.'" This symposium was followed (in December (988) by a conferimce of British theater professionals and academics entitled "Theater in Crisis."3 The 1980s were clearly a decade of attrition for the British theater, particularly on the Left, and the early years of the [990S have offered little change in the underlying policies and trends that brought about this attrition. Yet Griffiths 's career in the early nineties - like those of Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, and others in the theater - suggests that British social and politiCal theater is still alive, if diminished from its flourishing in the sixties and seventies. During the [980S, of course, Griffiths paid comparatively little attention to the stage. After Occupatio;lS, The Party, Absolute Beginners, Comedians, Through the Night, and the other theater and television plays of the 1970S that established his reputation as one of the Left's most politically articulate dramatic voices, Griffiths directed his writing energies almost exclusively toward television and film. With the exception of Oi for England in 1982 (first shown on television) and Real Dreams in 1984 (based on Jeremy Pikser's story "Revolution in Cleveland"), Griffiths's literary output in the 1980s lay outside the theater: the 1981 television play Country: "A TO/y Story," the 1985 television serial The Last Place on Earth, and the films Reds (co-written with Warren Beatty, 1981) and Fatherland (1986), based on two of seven screenplays (the rest unproduced) that he wrote during this time. Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 381 STANTON B. GARNER. JR. The [990S, though, have seen a return to the stage for Griffiths, and a concentration of theatrical activity unmatched since the early seventies. Piano. a Chekhovian play based on the ·Russian film Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, was produced at the Cottesloe in the summer of [990; The Gulf between Us or The Truth and Other Fictions, Griffiths's impassioned response to the Gulf War, opened at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (Leeds) in January 1992, on the anniversary of the war's outbreak; and Thatcher' s Children , a portrait of the generation that came to age during the 1980s, was produced in May [993 at the Bristol Old Vic. Hope in the Year Two, Griffiths's television play on Danton's final hours, was broadcast by the BBC on 11 May 1994; a stage version (under the title Who Shall be Happy? ...) was produced in Belfast in November 1995. Yet, as the "Theater in Crisis" conference underscored, the theater to which Griffiths has returned is a different institution from what it was in its post1968 political heyday.4 The political arena, too, has altered radically, as a result of developments both at home and abroad: the ascendancy of Thatcherism and its attacks on socialist ideals and the institutional structures of welfare capitalism, the progressive defeat of communism in Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the·Soviet Union. The fall ohhe Berlin Wall in 1989 sparked a brief renaissance of dramatic writing on the Left: Brenton and Tariq Ali's Moscow Gold, Churchill's Mad Forest, and David Edgar's The Shape of the Table, all produced in 1990, are the best known examples of what has become a kind of mini-genre. Griffiths, on the other hand, while certainly recognizing the political and ideological importance of the events in Eastern Europe, has focused his dramatic attention less on change in the East than on hegemonic continuity in the West, less on the death throes of the communist system than on...