With the great success of "Succession" fresh in one's mind, it's obvious what's wrong with Trevor Griffiths' "Country, which aired in Britain on "Play for Today" over 40 years ago but was not shown in America. The underlying story, like "Succession" is the fate of a family business with no clear heir to run it, but while the British author of "Succession" was to make an original, wildly funny hit (which could have been set in England or Australia given the Murdoch target of the story, and rendered hermetic), here Griffith concocts a quite dull tale even UK fans could easily reject as hoary.
Leo McKern is an aging UK beer magnate, whose son and heir has died in the war and none of the family men, including James Fox, could take over and make a go of the business. It's 1945 and Labor has just won a major victory at the polls, with Griffiths hammering away unsubtly concerning both the country's class system as well as its right-wing (think Thatcher) politics. (The show even opens with a voice-over of a particularly strong anti-socialist speech by Churchill.)
Fox is the best of a starry cast, playig his ultra-cynical uppercrust twit character to perfection, so well that even a Monty Python comedy sketch could not be better. But the script's intimations of humor and even sex all remain stillborn. Central plot device of squatters (actually hops pickers -remember this is a beer dynasty!) taking over McKern's stable and requriing the authorities to throw them out is poorly handled - it would be like taking "Succession" into areas like the Black Lives Matter movement (RIP?) or more current pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and having them overwhelm the central storyline. A particularly lousy scene is when Fox comes out as Gay to his mum Wendy Hiller - very poor writing. As is Fox also saying "that's not my bag", here in 1945, at least a decade or so before the jazz expression came into more general usage, especially after James Brown's hit song (1965).
This play aired just before Griffiths' screenplay for Reds was up for an Oscar and won the Writers Guild of America award, but other than his script for Ken Loach's evocative "Fatherland" his subsequent work is unimpressive.