Of the generation of writers who emerged in Britain during the 1970s broadly sharing a commitment to leftist politics, none has demonstrated such thematic consistency or such coherent and self-aware stylistic development as Trevor Griffiths. Together with such playwrights as David Mercer, Jim Allen, and Dennis Potter, Griffiths was responsible for establishing British television as a dramatic medium in its own right, focusing public attention on the most urgent political issues of the day and frequently provoking controversies that were covered in the news pages of the national press. At the same time, despite his declared preference for television and its capacity to reach a mass audience, his work in the theater has consistently stretched the limits of realism in a search for forms that challenge the audience's sense of present reality, its perception of the past, and the interaction between the two.

Griffiths's recurring concerns as a...