ABSTRACT
Naturalism wants what it thinks of as free space for social being to occur, and for meaning to attach to it.
As a TV dramatist, Trevor Griffiths has been particularly aware of the ways in which texts are appropriated: by critics, and by the rules of practice of the TV institution itself in its division of works into genres. For instance, his version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard challenged a dominant critical interpretation that had stripped the work of so much of its class content that
the play’s specific historicity and precise sociological imagination had been bleached of all meanings beyond those required to convey the necessary ‘natural’ sense that the fine will always be undermined by the crude and that the ‘human condition’ can for all essential purposes be equated with the ‘plight of the middle classes’.2
