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

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 commitmentand writing for the stage has been causing considerable doubt among radicalplaywrights for some time. Radical Marxists tend to point out that writing for apredominantly bourgeois audience of playgoers is incompatible with the Marxistclaim to address the proletariat and form a class consciousness that, for them, isthe necessary precursor to revolutionary change, while others support an interventionist position of Marxists in bourgeois cultures.1 This dilemma hasled the playwright Trevor Griffiths away from writing for the stage. Instead, hehas focused his output on television productions that are supposed to be watchedby a mass audience rather than an elitist one, although it has to be conceded thatproductions like these are often scheduled at late-night times where workingclassaudiences are likely to miss them, while prime-time entertainment, whichusually works against the interests of the proletariat, is rendered more easilyaccessible.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 iteschews political theory, professional ideologues and historically sourced discourse onpolitical revolution [ ] in favour of a more or less unmediated address on a range ofparticular contemporary issues including class, gender, race and society in modernBritain.3Unlike in his earlier plays, Griffiths tries to present an analysis of the wayrepressive ideologies work not merely by filtering them through the ideas andtheories of sophisticated and educated characters, but instead by exposing theway these ideologies function in contemporary British society. This society isrepresented by a class of aspiring comedians in an evening school in aManchester 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 thepopular imagination I am not interested in talking to thirty-eight university graduates in acellar 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.