Aside from Comedians (1975), the work of Trevor Griffiths is shockingly neglected. Yet he is one of the most questioning, intelligent political dramatists Britain has ever produced. Why does no one revive The Party (1973) which marked Olivier’s farewell to the stage? Why does the BBC, as we celebrate the NHS, not reshow Griffiths’ TV play about Aneurin Bevan, Food for Ravens (1997)? Above all – assuming theatre ever returns to something like normality – how about re-examining Occupations, which is a genuine modern classic?
First seen at the Manchester Stables in 1970, Occupations was given a superb Buzz Goodbody production, starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley, the following year by the RSC. Like a lot of Griffiths’ early work, the play was a response to the failure of the 1968 revolution in France. But, rather than deal directly with recent events, Griffiths finds what he calls a “historical correlative” in the abortive socialist uprising in Italy in 1920. We see Christo Kabak, a Bulgarian communist and representative of the Third International, arriving in Turin to await, and even influence, political events.
Among the visitors to his hotel room is Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian editor of a workers’ paper advocating factory soviets on the shop floor. In the conflict between these two men lies the meat of the play’s drama, and it is difficult to do justice to Griffiths’ ability to explore contrasting attitudes to revolution. In brutally simplistic terms, you could say that Kabak is the pragmatist and Gramsci the idealist. There is a great scene where Kabak urges Gramsci to incite an insurrection and speaks of the workers as if they were a military machine. Gramsci, aware of the danger of factory occupation without wholesale support, argues against a mechanistic view of the masses and asks, “How can a man love a collectivity when he has not profoundly loved single human creatures?”
There are many more layers to this complex play, but Griffiths is exploring a timeless political dilemma: that revolutions cannot succeed without discipline and organisation, yet the disciplining process itself damages the courage and optimism that inspired the original hunger for change. Griffiths says as much in his preface to the published text. But his play is a living, breathing drama rather than a thesis, and its power lies in its capacity to give equal weight to two opposing points of view. You could argue that Griffiths is better on global than gender politics: Kabak’s abandonment of his dying aristocratic lover is a too palpable symbol of his ruthless detachment. But, for me, this is much the best play about the nature of revolutionary politics since Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death.
