Oi for England at Edinburgh
Oi for England played on the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival at Venue 13 this year, in a new production by the Not Too Tame Theatre Company, directed by Jimmy Fairhurst. “An energetic and fascinating revival” … “a master class in compression and texture, rounded off with a brilliant and unexpected twist” ( www.theatre-wales.co.uk/reviews )
Oi for England
Published by Spokesman Books in Trevor Griffiths: Theatre Plays Two (2007)
First published by Faber & Faber in 1982
See also Television and Theatre
Oi For England (1982)
First broadcast on Central Television in April 1982. With Neil Pearson, Adam Kotz, Gavin Richards. Directed by Tony Smith. Produced by Sue Birtwhistle.
See also Theatre and Publications
Oi for England (1982)
Stage version of the television play. First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London on 9 June 1982, as part of the Young People’s Play Scheme. With Paul McGann, Robin Hayter, Paul Moriarty, Dorian Healy, Beverley Martin. Directed by Antonia Bird. Followed by a touring production by Nottingham Playhouse Theatre in Education.
See also Television and Publications
Comedians
Another screening for Comedians this time in the Northern Voices season at BFI Southbank 15th April 2023.
Details of the full season here:
Gabriele Salvatores slams the first clapperboard on Comedians
Filming has begun in Trieste on Gabriele Salvatores’ new title Comedians, a screen adaptation of the play of the same name which confirmed Trevor Griffiths’ playwright status. Written in the early 1970s, the play is set in a Manchester evening school, where a group of aspiring comedians reunite for a final rehearsal before performing for a London-based agent. Read more
BFI season
The British Film Institute ran a season of Trevor’s work for television at their South Bank cinema complex during May 2017.
It started on Tuesday 9th May with an on-stage conversation at 6.15 followed in the evening by a showing of Food for Ravens.
Read moreMarch Time
March Time, an original television screenplay written between 1987 and 1994, was published in the November 2012 edition of The Spokesman.
The Spokesman, which is the journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and which has published a number of Trevor’s other plays, is available from www.spokesmanbooks.com.
The following are extracts from the editorial note that will preface the text of March Time, written by Tony Simpson, editor of The Spokesman.
“Trevor Griffiths is a friend and comrade of the Russell Foundation of many years, going back to the 1960s and visits to London’s Red Café. In 1978 he served on the jury of the Third Russell Tribunal, which examined Berufsverbote, or bans on employment in the public service on political grounds and related aspects of human rights in what was then West Germany. Ten years ago, in 2002, he travelled to Cordoba in Spain to participate in a dialogue on peace and human rights which brought together activists from the region and more widely. The threat of coming war in Iraq hung over the assembly, which argued strongly and cogently for a “Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological.”
All the time, Griffiths was writing, adding to a distinguished and substantial body of work for the theatre, film and television. In 1982, Spokesman published Sons and Lovers, his sparkling screenplay for the BBC’s memorable adaptation of Lawrence’s coalfield novel. Twenty years on, in 2002, prior to Cordoba, we commenced publishing in The Spokesman an occasional series of Griffiths’s texts. The first was Camel Station, a short play with a very good joke, set in Iraq’s Northern No-Fly Zone (Spokesman 75).
In 2005, at Ken Coates’s instigation, Spokesman published Griffiths’s full-length screenplay about Thomas Paine, These Are The Times. Kurt Vonnegut loved it so much he declared that he wished he had written it, and requested dozens of copies to send to friends in Hollywood, some of whom did indeed promise to try to get the film made. Subsequently the work was adapted for the stage, under the title A New World, and premiered at The Globe in London to wide acclaim in 2009.
Michael Billington, The Guardian’s erstwhile and humane theatre critic, remarked that “Trevor Griffiths is the godfather of British political theatre” and rightly described him as “our foremost socialist dramatist”. Billington went on to urge a new production of Occupations, Griffiths’s first full-length play for the stage about factory occupations in northern Italy in 1920, which received its first production at the Stables Theatre in Manchester in 1970. Now that would be a timely revival.
Now, we are pleased to fulfil a longstanding commitment made by Ken Coates to Trevor Griffiths that The Spokesman would publish March Time, his screenplay homage to the Labour Movement down the ages. Originally written in 1987, in the midst of Thatcherism, and revised in 1994 as Tony Blair stole the Labour Party, March Time has been revised again for publication here. As neo-liberal destruction of public provision reaches deep into education and the health service, and ‘austerity’ is seen to be not for the rich but only for the rest of us, it couldn’t be more fitting.”
Tony Simpson
These Are The Times – A Life of Thomas Paine
A radio adaptation of this screenplay was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as a “Saturday Play”. Part I, “Common Sense”, was broadcast on July 26th 2008 and Part II, “Age of Reason”, on August 2nd. It starred Jonathan Pryce as Thomas Paine, with Alan Howard as Benjamin Franklin, Ken Cranham as Thomas Jefferson, Philip Jackson as George Washington, François Guetary as Danton, Kelly Hunter as Marthe Daley and Romola Garai as Carnet. It was adapted for radio by Trevor Griffiths and directed by Clive Brill, with music by John Tams. The producer was Ann Scott. It will be repeated on BBC3 at a future date.
Theatre Plays Two
Published by Spokesman Books in 2007. (www.spokesmanbooks.com)
This second volume of collected works for the theatre contains plays written from 1981 onwards: Oi for England, Real Dreams, Piano, The Gulf Between Us, Thatcher’s Children, Who Shall Be Happy…? and Camel Station.