Comedians: racist and sexist standups who messed with audiences’ minds

When Peter Hall, then the director of the National Theatre, saw Trevor Griffiths’s new play at Nottingham Playhouse in 1975, he wrote in his diary: “Trevor’s previous plays … were cerebral, political, challenging the audience intellectually. This play fucks them; it achieves a full human congress with them.”

The play – which opened 40 years ago on 20 February – was Comedians. It was written in reaction to Granada’s popular TV show The Comedians, in which the standup routines of Bernard Manning and his ilk took aim at women, ethnic minorities and gay people. To Griffiths, their every joke was “a lead pellet aimed at somebody in … my society”.

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Griffiths began to seek “another kind of humour … much more humane”, and found an ideal scenario after discovering that in a rented room above a Manchester pub, an elderly comic had been teaching young men to become standups. He told Richard Eyre, the Playhouse’s 30-year-old artistic director, that he wanted to dramatise an evening class for comedians. Eyre commissioned the play, then staged it in defiance of the Playhouse board, who objected to the script’s occasional swearwords.

In three acts, Comedians unfolds in real time, from 7.30–10pm, beginning in the classroom in Manchester where a 70-year-old ex-comic, Eddie Waters (played by Jimmy Jewel, once half of a popular variety double-act), has nurtured six working-class pupils, including a Belfast-born docker, George McBrain (Stephen Rea), and a skinhead van driver, Gethin Price (Jonathan Pryce), memorably described by Eyre as “a violent, almost psychopathic, romantic, dispossessed boy, consumed by a raging despair”.

They are about to perform at a working men’s club for Bert Challenor, an “agents’ man” who can whisk them away to unimagined riches on the Comedy Artists and Managers Federation circuit – if they ignore Waters’s doctrine of truth and morality in humour, and serve Challenor the stereotypes that made Manning rich.

In Act II, the theatre audience “become” the club’s punters and watch a double-act and four solo routines. Last on are McBrain, who reels off gags about stupid Irishmen and his “slut” of a wife (raped by a zoo gorilla), and then Gethin, who verbally and physically torments two tailor’s dummies, a man and a woman in evening dress.

Back in the classroom, Challenor signs up Jewish comic Sammy Samuels and McBrain – praising the plentiful sex in the latter’s act: “near the knuckle but not halfway up the armpit”. Waters chastises Gethin for his routine and reveals that he gave up performing after a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he discovered “there were no jokes left”.

Pryce remembers Comedians as being almost a perfect fit with who he was in his late 20s: “I’d spent nearly two years at the Everyman in Liverpool, after Rada, and from that experience was fairly politicised, [on] the left. A lot of things the play said fitted with [my] thinking, about the suppression of the working class especially.”

Rea recalls: “I was thin and angular, and McBrain was meant to be like Frank Carson, rather plump and bullish. But I did have the Belfast delivery. From the first page you knew it was a great play. I’ve had that experience with Translations by Brian Friel, and Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness. It’s to do with the tone: totally original.”

That September, Peter Hall brought Comedians to the Old Vic (then the National’s base), for a two-week run that Rea says was a career “liftoff” into leading roles; the NT immediately cast him as Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World. At the Old Vic, as in Nottingham, Pryce occasionally “had to back-pedal the violence in Gethin’s act, because I could hear people sobbing, or in distress”. He did not follow the play to Wyndham’s the following January because the transfer clashed with his first cinema role, in Voyage of the Damned. Kenneth Cranham took over, and gave what Rea calls “a more intellectual, less pyrotechnical performance”.

Comedians’ first three venues, Rea observes, were all “basically liberal theatres, not [working men’s] clubs. But all the people who [you’d expect to] have anti-sexist, anti-racist views were laughing their legs off at McBrain. That was the great irony. The trouble is that if something’s funny, it’s funny.” The effect on audiences of watching Gethin follow McBrain helps explain why a behavourial psychologist friend of Griffiths once remarked that Comedians was the sole instance in his theatregoing experience “where you’re invited to laugh, and then get punished for it”.

Pryce returned to Comedians at Broadway’s Music Box in October 1976. Its producer, Alexander Cohen, wanted a star director and passed over Eyre in favour of three-time Tony-winner Mike Nichols, who spent a Saturday in Manchester with Griffiths, touring the play’s working-class locations in Nichols’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

Pryce, now paired with Milo O’Shea as Waters, won a Tony as best featured actor. Portraying Gethin eight times a week was just as “emotionally draining” as his later performances as Hamlet (for Eyre, at the Royal Court in 1980) and King Lear (at the Almeida in 2012).

Comedians had been licensed for production in Argentina, Australia, Israel, Slovakia and beyond by 1979, when Pryce had his final turn as Gethin on BBC1 opposite Bill Fraser’s Waters. Eyre directed it as a Play for Today – and still regards it as “the best play of the 1970s”.

In 2001, Griffiths argued that Comedians might have been partly “instrumental” in the rise in the 1980s of alternative comedy, which “sought not to rubbish victim targets, but rather to question and criticise the traditional […] basis of British standup comedy.”

In recent years, the play’s staunchest admirers have included directors David Thacker and Sean Holmes. Thacker was bowled over by Comedians at Wyndham’s, aged 25, and revived it at the Young Vic in 1987, and at the Octagon, Bolton, in 2010. Holmes’s first attempt, for Oxford Stage Company in 2001, featured David Tennant as Gethin; his second, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, west London, with Matthew Kelly as Waters, came in 2009, when millions had become fixated on TV talent contests, and Griffiths’s sympathy for the six men desperate to escape humdrum lives through showbusiness led Holmes to view Comedians as a proto-X Factor, with Challenor a forerunner of Simon Cowell.

As the play turns 40, with an Italian adaptation soon to open in Milan, Griffiths says that actors who have appeared in Comedians occasionally buttonhole him in theatre bars, in the intervals of his, or other writers’ plays. “They say, ‘If only we’d done this with that moment’ – still pegging away at how they could’ve made [Comedians] better. There’s a sense of leaving a piece of yourself inside it, so that you can come back and deal with it, again and again.”