Trevor Griffiths

Trevor Griffiths (4 April 1935 – 29 March 2024) was an English dramatist.

Early life Trevor Griffiths was born in Ancoats, Manchester, and brought up as a Roman Catholic by his mother, Annie, who was a bus conductor, and his 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

Buoyed by Garnett's enthusiasm and influenced by the Paris events of May 1968, he wrote Occupations, a stage play about the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and the Fiat factory occupations of 1920s Italy. 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 in 1976 of his work as a television dramatist: "I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television... [for] if for every Sweeney that went out, a Bill Brand went out, there would be a real struggle for the popular imagination... and people would be free to make liberating choices about where reality lies." 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 schoolroom 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 Chekhov'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. He married Gill Cliff in 1992. He lived in Boston Spa.

Griffiths died from congestive heart failure at his home on 29 March 2024, six days before his 89th birthday.