it's just a bad system: A Marxist reading of Trevor Griffiths Comedians (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2+ (B), Ruhr-University of Bochum (English Seminar), course: Hauptseminar Trevor Griffiths: Comedians, language: English, abstract: The question of whether and how to combine left-wing political commitment
and writing for the stage has been causing considerable doubt among radical
playwrights for some time. Radical Marxists tend to point out that writing for a
predominantly bourgeois audience of playgoers is incompatible with the Marxist
claim to address the proletariat and form a class consciousness that, for them, is
the necessary precursor to revolutionary change, while others support an
"interventionist" position of Marxists in bourgeois cultures.1 This dilemma has
led the playwright Trevor Griffiths away from writing for the stage. Instead, he
has focused his output on television productions that are supposed to be watched
by a mass audience rather than an elitist one, although it has to be conceded that
productions like these are often scheduled at late-night times where workingclass
audiences are likely to miss them, while prime-time entertainment, which
usually works against the interests of the proletariat, is rendered more easily
accessible.2 Nevertheless Griffiths has produced a number of plays for the stage,
the most notable of which, Comedians (1976), will be discussed in this paper.
In his introduction to Plays One, Griffiths remarks about this drama that it
eschews political theory, professional ideologues and historically sourced discourse on
political revolution [...] in favour of a more or less unmediated address on a range of
particular contemporary issues including class, gender, race and society in modern
Britain.3
Unlike in his earlier plays, Griffiths tries to present an analysis of the way
repressive ideologies work not merely by filtering them through the ideas and
theories of sophisticated and educated characters, but instead by exposing the
way these ideologies function in contemporary British society. This society is
represented by a class of aspiring comedians in an evening school in a
Manchester suburb. [...]

1 Cf. Catherine Itzin, Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968 (London:
Eyre Methuen, 1980), pp. 165, 169f.
2 Griffiths points out that he "chose to work in those modes because ... I have to work with the
popular imagination ... I am not interested in talking to thirty-eight university graduates in a
cellar in Soho." Quoted after Itzin, Stages in the Revolution (cit. note 1), p. 169.
3 Trevor Griffiths, Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. viii.