Trevor Griffiths obituary

Trevor Griffiths in 1973. He insisted that his writing should not be ‘mucked about with’ or ‘diluted’ for commercial reasons and refused to accept that cinema is a director’s medium. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Trevor Griffiths, who has died aged 88, was the most politically literate working-class dramatist and screenwriter of our times, a scholar of Marx, Gramsci and Trotsky, who translated his passion into a series of plays and television dramas without equal.

Although his early success came in the theatre – at the Stables in Manchester, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the National Theatre where, in 1973, his bracing analysis of factionalism on the left, The Party, provided Laurence Olivier with his last stage role, as an ageing Glaswegian Trotskyite, John Tagg – he much preferred to write for television.