STALINISM IS NOT SOCIALISM/CAPITALISM IS NOT FREEDOM

British dramatist Trevor Griffiths wrote those words. Pithy, epigrammatic, they should have guided our way into the post-Soviet era. But they appeared — not spoken, but as a graffiti — in a film that failed called Fatherland, so they did not have the influence they should have.

I knew Trevor Griffiths a bit. He has just died a few days short of his 89th birthday and I am going to depart from First Rough Draft of History’s usual subject matter to pay tribute to him.

It won’t be a big departure because Trevor was a dramatist who worked with history. He was a Marxist, a man who understood that society is shaped by historical forces. His great skill and the reason for his success was to take political ideas and make them the foundation of dramas for stage, screen and television in which real people lived out the dilemmas created by these ideas.

Jonathan Pryce as Gethin Price in the original production of Griffiths’ Comedians

In the summer of 1976, my brief acting “career’ had its nearly moment. I was called in to read scenes with actors auditioning for the Broadway production of Trevor’s play Comedians which was being directed by Mike Nichols.

The auditions were held at the theatre where the play would open, the Golden on 45th St, and I arrived for the first day a half hour early, eager and ready to make an impression. Trevor was there already, equally excited. The stage doorman showed me into the backstage area and introduced us.

He was a physical presence. Prince Valiant haircut, physical vigour and grace. When he was young, he had been offered a contract to play football by Manchester United and had also studied martial arts but had gone into teaching after studying English at Manchester University and doing his army National Service.

And that’s what he did for years and there was something of the kindly teacher about him just as there was also a genuine comradeliness in our first interaction: A handshake, an offer of egalitarianism. He’s the author, I’m just the guy sitting on the side of the stage feeding lines to the actors.

He came by the comradeliness naturally, as well. He was genuinely working class—the marginalised community of its time, in those days before everything was seen through a racial lens—and his socialist politics were not an intellectual affectation acquired at university. They were the product of a thorough reading of the classic texts of Marx through Gramsci, and filtered through his life experience. His principles guided his behaviour

He had just turned 40 and his progress to success had been a steady not a meteoric one. The walls of specialist training that separate the theatre from ordinary British society today did not exist in the early Sixties and Trevor started writing plays for local theatres in Manchester then and by the end of that decade was getting noticed and in the early Seventies, Kenneth Tynan commissioned him to write something for Olivier at the National.

Trevor wrote The Party, a play of ideas about the prospects for revolution post-1968. It’s inspiration came from his own experiences that year, attending meetings of television producers, writers and left-wing leaders most of them solidly middle class, discussing whether the Paris events, the assassinations and riots in America heralded revolution in capitalist democracies. The author was struck by the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the very safe middle class lives the participants led.

I entered Antioch College in the fall of 1968 where the same ideas were being hotly debated and had the same reaction from my privileged upper middle class point of origin as Trevor had from his working class roots. It was an intellectual affinity between us.

The Party was a great success. And now he was a hot writer in Britain for television and the stage but you would never have known it from the way we spoke in those minutes before Mike Nichols arrived. I knew Manchester a bit, all the friends I had made on my junior year abroad in England had come from the city and I had visited the place and surrounding Lancashire environment more than once. There was easy small talk about his hometown, and he asked questions of me out of genuine curiosity, in a brotherly, familiar way, although we had only known each other 10 minutes.

The casting sessions went on for weeks, and there were many breaks in the daily schedule, Mike Nichols was summoned occasionally to the editing room by a panicked Elaine May to look at scenes from her film Mikey and Nicky, a legendary catastrophe, which she couldn’t cut down to a reasonable length. In these long breaks, Trevor and I would talk, walking up one aisle of the empty theatre and down another.

He used me as a bit of a sounding board about his impressions of America. Mike invited him to his Connecticut estate one weekend. Warren Beatty was also there. That weekend would be the beginning of a collaboration that led to their co-writing the screenplay for Reds. He came back from it and spoke with some amazement at what seemed to be the very left views of such a Hollywood mover and shaker.

We discussed the 19th century English novel. I said to Trevor, “I really don’t like Austen.” “Oh no, she’s wonderful.”

I expressed surprise that someone with his politics could find the doings of the gentry and further up the food chain in early 19th century English country houses wonderful. He gave me a brief tutorial from a Marxist perspective on the precarity of women in Austen’s time and the economic conditions that underline so many of her novels, the truth beneath the wit of

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Similarly, Comedians is about the ways in which humor, jokes, can be—should be— about serious things. On the page it was perfect. I mean perfect from an actor’s perspective because the lines are perfectly weighted, make sense on first reading, and you want to play every part so you can say all of them. It was audacious and brilliant.

A group of working class men are taking a night school course in stand-up comedy taught by a veteran comic who left performance years back. He is not just teaching them techniques for telling jokes but trying to instill in them the idea that every joke should have a reason for existing beside the punchline and the gratification of making people laugh.

"A joke is not a laughing matter."

The play unfolds on the final night of the class when the wannabe stand-ups go to a working man’s club to perform their routines. The teacher announces that an agent from London will be in the audience and is looking to sign the best of them to contracts. The prospect of leaving the drudgery of their lives behind for show business brings to the surface the group's desperation. They start making last minute adjustments to their work, adding cheap gags in the hope of being noticed.

In the middle part of the play they perform their acts and the theatre audience becomes the working man’s club audience. Disaster unfolds when the youngest in the class and the last to do his act does a brilliant and violent piece of performance art about soccer hooligans and murdering class enemies. In the third act the agent makes his choices and the source of the disaster, the youngest in the class explains himself to his teacher.

"I felt ... I felt expressed."

Jonathan Pryce played the young comedian and it was his star-making role.

The piece became an instant classic, and yet is unplayable now. Comedy changes constantly. The routines in the centre of the play are dated. Trevor wrote some to be intentionally crude and offensive. Today those routines are absolutely unsayable in polite company, although if you push me I can still do bits of them. I started memorizing them when the producer’s office told me I was being hired as a general understudy for the show, it didn’t happen but that’s another story.

Flash forward a decade. I’m recently arrived in London and no longer an actor but a journalist. Those who can, act. Those who can’t, become arts journalists and critics. I get in touch with Trevor and he seems genuinely delighted to hear from me.

We agree to meet up at the London Film Festival after the screening of Fatherland for which he has written the script. The film was torture for Trevor, he and director Ken Loach fought over changes to the script. The critics hated it, although any film with cinematography by Chris Menges is never dire.

But the film had that epigram:

"Stalinism is not socialism, Capitalism is not freedom."

The film is about an East German protest singer who flees the country for the West and finds dealing with the music business on the other side of the wall also restricts his artistic freedom.

Although Trevor didn’t go into deep detail he was not happy with what Ken Loach had done with his script, as he had not been happy with what Warren Beatty had done with Reds, even though the pair were nominated for an Oscar for their work. He hinted that perhaps he found both men too willing to make changes to satsify producers or studios; or perhaps they did not give the audience enough credit for the intelligence to understand dialogue rich in ideas.

Then he asked about my own journey from acting to journalism and what motivated my return to England. We moved on to Reagan’s America and how the country had lurched to the right so quickly.

We were back in touch in late summer 1991 when Gorbachev dissolved the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. That night for NPR I interviewed several people in Britain who still held Communist Party membership. Most had been involved with the party all their lives and stayed true to its tenets even after popular uprisings in Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 were brutally suppressed. It was a mournful piece.

I called Trevor. I don’t know if he had ever been in the party but he identified as a Marxist, a socialist and in an ideal world wouldn’t have objected to communism, but was against what the Soviet version became under Stalin. I didn’t do an interview with him but used our conversation as background for how to frame the story.

“Stalinism is not socialism, capitalism is not freedom.”

If I had not known Trevor Griffiths I don’t know if that epigram would have stayed in my memory.

But those words should be better known. They are the most elegant explanation of why the end of the Soviet Union did not bring the end of history and they are a reminder to the left, if it can ever rid itself of its identitarian obsessions, that true socialism has never really been achieved and is still worth fighting for. It opens the door to a line of argument against capitalism based on an obvious truth: there is no such thing as a free market in goods or ideas. We all operate under constraints imposed by whatever economic system we live in.

I am proud to have known and been taught by the man who wrote them and honor his memory by sharing them with you.