Griffiths, who has died aged 88, explored the conflict between reform and revolution in plays and scripts from the film Reds to dramas such as Occupations, The Party and Comedians

Of all the political dramatists who emerged in Britain in the late 1960s, Trevor Griffiths, who has died aged 88, was the most fervent and committed. As a Mancunian Marxist he brought to theatre his love of dialectic. He also believed passionately in “strategic penetration” of the citadels of culture. He succeeded, in that plays such as The Party and Comedians were taken up by the National Theatre; Bill Brand, an 11-part series about the frustrations of parliamentary democracy, was shown on ITV; and his screenplay for Reds, co-authored with Warren Beatty and based on John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.

If there was one theme that informed Griffiths’s work, it was the conflict between reformist pragmatism and revolutionary idealism. It was there in an early work like Occupations, first seen at the Manchester Stables in 1970 and quickly picked up by the RSC for a production starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Set in Turin in 1920 at a time when every engineering factory in northern Italy had been taken over by the workers, the play involves a head-on confrontation between Kabak, a businesslike Comintern representative, and Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian firebrand advocating shop-floor soviets.

Continue reading...

Communism also among ideologies on document as human rights groups say UK scheme has been politicised

A document from Prevent, the official scheme to stop radicalisation, includes believing in socialism, communism, anti-fascism and anti-abortion in a list of potential signs of ideologies leading to terrorism.

It comes as the Conservative government considers widening what it will consider to be extremism.

Continue reading...

Manuel Rocha was arrested for allegedly engaging in ‘clandestine activity’ on the communist country’s behalf since at least 1981

A former career US diplomat told a federal judge on Thursday he will plead guilty to charges of working for decades as a secret agent for communist Cuba, an unexpectedly swift resolution to a case prosecutors called one of the most brazen betrayals in the history of the US foreign service.

Manuel Rocha’s stunning fall from grace could culminate in a lengthy prison term after the 73-year-old said he would admit to federal counts of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government.

Continue reading...

Playwright best known for his signature early works The Hamlet of Stepney Green and Enter Solly Gold

Although once bracketed with Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker , his fellow East End of London Jewish playwrights of the late 1950s, Bernard Kops, who has died aged 97, was a more fantastical, surreal writer than either. And while Pinter was always a political writer, Kops and Wesker, though committed socialists (and Kops a communist who sold copies of the Morning Star outside Whitechapel station), offered more sentimental portraits of Jewish family life in the context of local and European history.

Kops’s two early signature plays, which remain his best known – The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957) and Enter Solly Gold (1961) – established his main themes of emotional and material escape from the humdrum life. This “improvement” is invariably an illusion as Kops celebrates the durability of love, virtue and belonging.

Continue reading...

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments