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The Party
The year is 1968; in Paris the événements - the student rising - are taking place. In the London drawing-room of a successful television producer a group of people meet to discuss the implications for them and their belief in a socialist society and how it can be achieved. The Party, commissioned by the National Theatre and with a cast including Laurence Olivier, Ronald Pickup, Frank Finlay and Denis Quilley, was first performed in 1973 and was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984.
75 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1974
About the author
Trevor Griffiths
71 books3 followersTrevor Griffiths is an English dramatist.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, he attended Saint Bede's College, before being accepted into Manchester University in 1952 to read English. After a brief involvement with professional football and a year in National Service, he became a teacher.
He was chairman of the Manchester Left Club, and the editor of the Labour Party's Northern Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism, began writing plays, and was eventually commissioned by Tony Garnett to provide a script for The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964–70). The play, "The Love Maniac", was about a teacher, but even though Garnett took the commission with him when he moved to London Weekend Television and formed Kestrel Productions, it was never produced. Buoyed by Garnett's enthusiasm and influenced by the Paris evenements of May 1968, he wrote Occupations, a stage play about Gramsci and the Fiat factory occupations of 1920s Italy.
The play soon brought him to the attention of Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager of the National Theatre who promptly commissioned Griffiths to write the play that became The Party. This critique of the British revolutionary left (featuring the National's artistic director Laurence Olivier in his last stage role as the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg) failed. A series of television plays, such as All Good Men (Play for Today, BBC, 31 January 1974) and Absolute Beginners (BBC, 19 April 1974, in the series Fall of Eagles), followed. He developed this further with his series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), which was probably the summation of his dialectic technique.
In the meantime Griffiths returned to the theatre with the Nottingham Playhouse production of Comedians directed by Richard Eyre first performed on 20 February 1975, which later transferred to Broadway. Comedians is set in a school in Manchester, where a bunch 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 school room also says 7.27. The text of the play was first published in 1976 and is now a popular A-level text.
Griffiths' reputation at the time was such that Warren Beatty reportedly asked him to write a screenplay for project about the US revolutionary John Reed, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (1981). He also wrote the screenplay for Fatherland, which was directed by Ken Loach.
Griffiths continued to work in the theatre, garnering a notable success with the touring production of Oi for England (ITV, 17 April 1982). His teleplay, Country (BBC, 20 October 1981) was a rarity for Griffiths, a period piece that contained none of the political rhetoric familiar from his earlier works. Griffiths examined the nature of Conservatism through the prism of the 1945 general election. He wrote the television serial, Last Place on Earth (ITV, 1985).
The advent of Thatcher, and the reduced opportunities for a writer of the single play, let alone such a political writer as Griffiths, led him back to the theatre, where he has produced a number of plays over the last fifteen years to varying degrees of commercial and critical success.[citation needed] Griffiths's most recent teleplay, Food for Ravens (BBC, 15 November 1997), was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of Aneurin Bevan's birth, but at one point the BBC decided not to network the play, and instead restrict it to Wales.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, he attended Saint Bede's College, before being accepted into Manchester University in 1952 to read English. After a brief involvement with professional football and a year in National Service, he became a teacher.
He was chairman of the Manchester Left Club, and the editor of the Labour Party's Northern Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism, began writing plays, and was eventually commissioned by Tony Garnett to provide a script for The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964–70). The play, "The Love Maniac", was about a teacher, but even though Garnett took the commission with him when he moved to London Weekend Television and formed Kestrel Productions, it was never produced. Buoyed by Garnett's enthusiasm and influenced by the Paris evenements of May 1968, he wrote Occupations, a stage play about Gramsci and the Fiat factory occupations of 1920s Italy.
The play soon brought him to the attention of Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager of the National Theatre who promptly commissioned Griffiths to write the play that became The Party. This critique of the British revolutionary left (featuring the National's artistic director Laurence Olivier in his last stage role as the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg) failed. A series of television plays, such as All Good Men (Play for Today, BBC, 31 January 1974) and Absolute Beginners (BBC, 19 April 1974, in the series Fall of Eagles), followed. He developed this further with his series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), which was probably the summation of his dialectic technique.
In the meantime Griffiths returned to the theatre with the Nottingham Playhouse production of Comedians directed by Richard Eyre first performed on 20 February 1975, which later transferred to Broadway. Comedians is set in a school in Manchester, where a bunch 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 school room also says 7.27. The text of the play was first published in 1976 and is now a popular A-level text.
Griffiths' reputation at the time was such that Warren Beatty reportedly asked him to write a screenplay for project about the US revolutionary John Reed, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (1981). He also wrote the screenplay for Fatherland, which was directed by Ken Loach.
Griffiths continued to work in the theatre, garnering a notable success with the touring production of Oi for England (ITV, 17 April 1982). His teleplay, Country (BBC, 20 October 1981) was a rarity for Griffiths, a period piece that contained none of the political rhetoric familiar from his earlier works. Griffiths examined the nature of Conservatism through the prism of the 1945 general election. He wrote the television serial, Last Place on Earth (ITV, 1985).
The advent of Thatcher, and the reduced opportunities for a writer of the single play, let alone such a political writer as Griffiths, led him back to the theatre, where he has produced a number of plays over the last fifteen years to varying degrees of commercial and critical success.[citation needed] Griffiths's most recent teleplay, Food for Ravens (BBC, 15 November 1997), was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of Aneurin Bevan's birth, but at one point the BBC decided not to network the play, and instead restrict it to Wales.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 3, 2026
The social convulsion which serves as the backdrop of the story, is the revolutionary general strike in France and radical student protest movement of 1968. In England, where the story takes place, we participate in a gathering of intellectuals, artists, and left political figures discuss their assessment of unfolding events and how they view the prospects for the struggle for a new society. This play powerfully captures and recreates scenes from actual meetings which took place in London, in the 1960s; meetings which the socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths himself attended.
As the discussion of the intellectuals begins, the perspective presented by the middle class characters is demoralized, unsure of what role the working class might play, groping about for some orientation or anchor, raising the question "which social force or forces will lead the revolution?" The remarks use the academic jargon of the "New Left" as the dialogue of the definite social type. Some concern themselves more with their artistic careers, sexual activities, others have real hopes to contribute to a better future but feel utterly impotent to do anything to change society.
Then, the imperious John Tagg (based on real life Trotskyist revolutionary, Gerry Healy, in his best years, and originally performed by the celebrated Laurence Olivier) addresses the room. The reader can sense that he is fundamentally different that the other characters. Many of the other characters were suspicious or hostile to him, he appeared coarse. When he speaks it is clear that he is bringing in something new: perspective, history, orientation, firmness, and clarity. Tagg sharply criticizes the remarks of some of the other characters, explains the source of the other characters' pessimism, and explains the historical Theory, social force, and political organization necessary for socialist revolution. The 22 minute monologue, based on an actual speech delivered to a meeting which Griffiths attended, is worth quoting at length:
"I spend most of my time with workers - dockers, miners, engineers, car-workers, bricklayers, seamen. And as I’ll try to explain later, a revolutionary party or faction that fails to establish itself in the working class, to base itself upon it, can lay no claim whatsoever to serious attention...
...we’re entering a new phase in the revolutionary struggle against the forces and the structures of capitalism...The question is: How may they be brought to help the revolution? Or are they simply doomed forever to be merely ‘protests’ that the ‘repressive tolerance’ of ‘late capitalist’ societies will absorb and render impotent?
You’re intellectuals. You’re frustrated by the ineffectual character of your opposition to the things you loathe. Your main weapon is the word. Your protest is verbal - it has to be: it wears itself out by repetition and leads you nowhere.
Somehow you sense - and properly so - that for a protest to be effective, it must be rooted in the realities of social life, in the productive processes of a nation or a society. In 1919 London dockers went on strike and refused to load munitions for the White armies fighting against the Russian revolution. In 1944 dockers in Amsterdam refused to help the Nazis transport Jews to concentration camps.
What can you do? You can’t strike and refuse to handle American cargoes until they get out of Vietnam. You’re outside the productive process. You have only the word. And you cannot make it become the deed. And because the people who have the power seem uneager to use it, you develop this . . . cynicism . . . this contempt. You say: The working class has been assimilated, corrupted, demoralized. You point to his car and his house and his pension scheme and his respectability, and you write him off.
You build a whole theory around it and you fill it with grandiloquent phrases like ‘epicentres’ and ‘neocolonialism’. But basically what you do is you find some scapegoat for your own frustration and misery....
Well. Which workers have you spoken with recently? And for how long? How do you know they’re not as frustrated as you are? Especially the young ones, who take the cars and the crumbs from the table for granted? If they don’t satisfy you, why should they satisfy the people who actually create the wealth in the first place? You start from the presumption that only you are intelligent and sensitive enough to see how bad capitalist society is. Do you really think the young man who spends his whole life in monotonous and dehumanizing work doesn’t see it too? And in a way more deeply, more woundingly?
Suddenly you lose contact - not with ideas, not with abstractions, concepts, because they’re after all your stock-in-trade. You lose contact with the moral tap-roots of socialism. In an objective sense, you actually stop believing in a revolutionary perspective, in the possibility of a socialist society and the creation of socialist man. You see the difficulties, you see the complexities and contradictions, and you settle for those as a sort of game you can play with each other. Finally, you learn to enjoy your pain; to need it, so that you have nothing to offer your bourgeois peers but a sort of moral exhaustion.
You can’t build socialism on fatigue, comrades....
Theory isn’t abstract; it isn’t words on a page; it isn’t. . . aesthetically pleasing patterns of ideas and evidence. Theory is concrete. It’s distilled practice. Above all, theory is felt, in the veins, in the muscles, in the sweat on your forehead. In that sense, it’s moral . . . and binding. It’s the essential connective imperative between past and future."
Such remarks, spoken in the 1960s, performed in the 1970s, can be repeated today without changing much at all. Tagg concludes his monologue: "There is only one slogan worth mouthing at this particular historical conjunction. It is: ‘Build the Revolutionary Party’. There is no other slogan that can possibly take precedence." The perspective and optimism of Tagg is the language of genuine revolutionary politics, something so rarely captured with accuracy and truthfulness in the arts, film, or literature. It is a breath of fresh air.
As the discussion of the intellectuals begins, the perspective presented by the middle class characters is demoralized, unsure of what role the working class might play, groping about for some orientation or anchor, raising the question "which social force or forces will lead the revolution?" The remarks use the academic jargon of the "New Left" as the dialogue of the definite social type. Some concern themselves more with their artistic careers, sexual activities, others have real hopes to contribute to a better future but feel utterly impotent to do anything to change society.
Then, the imperious John Tagg (based on real life Trotskyist revolutionary, Gerry Healy, in his best years, and originally performed by the celebrated Laurence Olivier) addresses the room. The reader can sense that he is fundamentally different that the other characters. Many of the other characters were suspicious or hostile to him, he appeared coarse. When he speaks it is clear that he is bringing in something new: perspective, history, orientation, firmness, and clarity. Tagg sharply criticizes the remarks of some of the other characters, explains the source of the other characters' pessimism, and explains the historical Theory, social force, and political organization necessary for socialist revolution. The 22 minute monologue, based on an actual speech delivered to a meeting which Griffiths attended, is worth quoting at length:
"I spend most of my time with workers - dockers, miners, engineers, car-workers, bricklayers, seamen. And as I’ll try to explain later, a revolutionary party or faction that fails to establish itself in the working class, to base itself upon it, can lay no claim whatsoever to serious attention...
...we’re entering a new phase in the revolutionary struggle against the forces and the structures of capitalism...The question is: How may they be brought to help the revolution? Or are they simply doomed forever to be merely ‘protests’ that the ‘repressive tolerance’ of ‘late capitalist’ societies will absorb and render impotent?
You’re intellectuals. You’re frustrated by the ineffectual character of your opposition to the things you loathe. Your main weapon is the word. Your protest is verbal - it has to be: it wears itself out by repetition and leads you nowhere.
Somehow you sense - and properly so - that for a protest to be effective, it must be rooted in the realities of social life, in the productive processes of a nation or a society. In 1919 London dockers went on strike and refused to load munitions for the White armies fighting against the Russian revolution. In 1944 dockers in Amsterdam refused to help the Nazis transport Jews to concentration camps.
What can you do? You can’t strike and refuse to handle American cargoes until they get out of Vietnam. You’re outside the productive process. You have only the word. And you cannot make it become the deed. And because the people who have the power seem uneager to use it, you develop this . . . cynicism . . . this contempt. You say: The working class has been assimilated, corrupted, demoralized. You point to his car and his house and his pension scheme and his respectability, and you write him off.
You build a whole theory around it and you fill it with grandiloquent phrases like ‘epicentres’ and ‘neocolonialism’. But basically what you do is you find some scapegoat for your own frustration and misery....
Well. Which workers have you spoken with recently? And for how long? How do you know they’re not as frustrated as you are? Especially the young ones, who take the cars and the crumbs from the table for granted? If they don’t satisfy you, why should they satisfy the people who actually create the wealth in the first place? You start from the presumption that only you are intelligent and sensitive enough to see how bad capitalist society is. Do you really think the young man who spends his whole life in monotonous and dehumanizing work doesn’t see it too? And in a way more deeply, more woundingly?
Suddenly you lose contact - not with ideas, not with abstractions, concepts, because they’re after all your stock-in-trade. You lose contact with the moral tap-roots of socialism. In an objective sense, you actually stop believing in a revolutionary perspective, in the possibility of a socialist society and the creation of socialist man. You see the difficulties, you see the complexities and contradictions, and you settle for those as a sort of game you can play with each other. Finally, you learn to enjoy your pain; to need it, so that you have nothing to offer your bourgeois peers but a sort of moral exhaustion.
You can’t build socialism on fatigue, comrades....
Theory isn’t abstract; it isn’t words on a page; it isn’t. . . aesthetically pleasing patterns of ideas and evidence. Theory is concrete. It’s distilled practice. Above all, theory is felt, in the veins, in the muscles, in the sweat on your forehead. In that sense, it’s moral . . . and binding. It’s the essential connective imperative between past and future."
Such remarks, spoken in the 1960s, performed in the 1970s, can be repeated today without changing much at all. Tagg concludes his monologue: "There is only one slogan worth mouthing at this particular historical conjunction. It is: ‘Build the Revolutionary Party’. There is no other slogan that can possibly take precedence." The perspective and optimism of Tagg is the language of genuine revolutionary politics, something so rarely captured with accuracy and truthfulness in the arts, film, or literature. It is a breath of fresh air.
Read
November 15, 2024A very talky play, which seems to on the one level seriously lament the disintegration of unified left-wing thought in Britain in the late 60s, but simultaneously participate in many of the discourses which prompted that disintegration.
December 5, 2024
Trevor Griffiths vents spleen at the New Left in this short play which takes place in apartment hosting a broad-tent debate / socialist meeting over the course of an evening. A character apparently based on Robin Blackburn appears, but he would do for any member of the NLR's editorial board. Words and phrases that remain fixtures of their house style even to the present are threaded throughout a short paper Blackburn delivers that lays out the canonical New Left reasons why the German, Italian, British and French (proletarian variant) Revolutions never happened, Marcusean reasons why identity-based struggles in the metropole and anti-colonial revolt in the periphery now contain the authentic revolutionary germ.
Griffiths voice comes through most clearly in two places i) a character based on uber-trot Gerry Healy and ii) an alcoholic, mentally distressed working-class autodidact playwright, who, in very different ways, heckle the students, academics and journalists in attendance as posturing dilettantes. Paris '68 happens offstage and while everyone else is watching it on tv and smoking joints Healy is in contact with his cadre on the ground and trying to find out what the petty-bourgeois Mandelite wreckers are up to. Before he leaves he expresses the hope that the wished-for convergence of workers and students will not materialise as as things stand the Trotskyist forces cannot take control or lead the struggle and consequently they will be led into the hands of the PCF; I do think this is put forward as indicating of his wisdom and humanity.
The publication of Aidan Beatty's book about Gerry Healy has prompted some remnants of Healyism to write a number of book-length hatchet jobs of his work (which I recommend seeking out both for entertainment value as well as the material that speaks to Beatty's relationships with Israeli-aligned institutions and funding bodies which people should start to ask him about) in which they present this text as an endorsement of orthodox Trotskyism against the doomed and dissolute politics of identity and anti-racism. While I think Griffiths prefers the Fourth International to students this is a misreading, Griffiths is not adjudicating the question of the Party form what this is is a Play for Today about a middle-class man who doesn't know what he wants. The owner of the apartment is a producer on a thinly-disguised version of Play for Today, and therefore someone Griffiths would have scrapped with due to the BBC's tendency to water down or block his more radical scripts, most notably one about James McClean.
In keeping with Griffiths' Thompsonite critique, and precedent later established in Bill Brand, the heart of the play is contained in moments of working class moral indignation and with this line comes a tendency to write off anti-imperialism, rubbish claims that the western working class aren't similarly exploited (how did that work out) but Griffiths does allow for a great moment in which his non-Healy stand-in delivers a speech on the dialectic and the historical immanence of resistance against class domination. RIP big man
Griffiths voice comes through most clearly in two places i) a character based on uber-trot Gerry Healy and ii) an alcoholic, mentally distressed working-class autodidact playwright, who, in very different ways, heckle the students, academics and journalists in attendance as posturing dilettantes. Paris '68 happens offstage and while everyone else is watching it on tv and smoking joints Healy is in contact with his cadre on the ground and trying to find out what the petty-bourgeois Mandelite wreckers are up to. Before he leaves he expresses the hope that the wished-for convergence of workers and students will not materialise as as things stand the Trotskyist forces cannot take control or lead the struggle and consequently they will be led into the hands of the PCF; I do think this is put forward as indicating of his wisdom and humanity.
The publication of Aidan Beatty's book about Gerry Healy has prompted some remnants of Healyism to write a number of book-length hatchet jobs of his work (which I recommend seeking out both for entertainment value as well as the material that speaks to Beatty's relationships with Israeli-aligned institutions and funding bodies which people should start to ask him about) in which they present this text as an endorsement of orthodox Trotskyism against the doomed and dissolute politics of identity and anti-racism. While I think Griffiths prefers the Fourth International to students this is a misreading, Griffiths is not adjudicating the question of the Party form what this is is a Play for Today about a middle-class man who doesn't know what he wants. The owner of the apartment is a producer on a thinly-disguised version of Play for Today, and therefore someone Griffiths would have scrapped with due to the BBC's tendency to water down or block his more radical scripts, most notably one about James McClean.
In keeping with Griffiths' Thompsonite critique, and precedent later established in Bill Brand, the heart of the play is contained in moments of working class moral indignation and with this line comes a tendency to write off anti-imperialism, rubbish claims that the western working class aren't similarly exploited (how did that work out) but Griffiths does allow for a great moment in which his non-Healy stand-in delivers a speech on the dialectic and the historical immanence of resistance against class domination. RIP big man
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews