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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
22 people want to read
About the author
Trevor Griffiths
70 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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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
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