Trevor Griffiths

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

Quotes

• 'Strategic penetrations' is a phrase I use a lot for the work of socialists and Marxists in bourgeois cultures ... I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television. That they can write for the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and only that, seems to me a wilful self-delusion about the nature of theatre in a bourgeois culture now ... It's just thunderingly exciting to be able top talk to large numbers of people in the working class, and I can't understand why everybody doesn't want to do it.
  • Interview in The Leveller (November 1976), p. 12–13, as cited in Catherine Itzin Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968, London: Methuen, 1980 [1986], p. 165

• [Estimating the proportion of the script for Reds that he wrote] I'd say 45 per cent. My first draft was 320 pages. The second involved co-writing with [Warren] Beatty. The third I had nothing to do with.
• [M]y folly was to believe movies were like plays; that you can fight for your vision. Forget it. A movie doesn't belong to you at all.
  • From an interview, as cited in "Putting the world to rights", The Independent on Sunday (9 August 2009)

• [On his grandmother] She was blind and her legs went gangrenous, but she was the most important woman I've ever known, untutored and very strong.
  • Undated quote, as cited in "Trevor Griffiths obituary: dramatist who wrote the influential play Comedians", The Times (3 April 2024).
  • Griffith lived with his grandmother from the age of two; his family could not afford a family home as his father gambled too much on greyhounds.