David Edgar FRSL (born 26 February 1948) is a British playwright and writer who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain.
His plays have been directed by former artistic directors of both of the largest British subsidised companies, Trevor Nunn for the RSC and Peter Hall for the National Theatre.
[8] His father, Barrie Edgar (1919–2012),[9] was an actor and stage manager at the Birmingham Rep, before joining the BBC in 1946,[10] soon working as a television producer, whose credits included Come Dancing and Songs of Praise.
[12] Being brought up in what he later recalled as a "more or less upper-middle-class family",[11] with both parents, three grandparents, and "various other slightly more distant relatives" all involved in the theatre or broadcasting, Edgar remembers having seen most of the Shakespeare canon by the age of fifteen, either in his native Birmingham or in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon, plus the complete Agatha Christie and many more of "the sort of plays one would never go to now.
In addition to chairing the Socialist Society at Manchester University, Edgar edited the student newspaper, and found himself unable to heed his mother's advice.
While writing for his newspaper to expose a minor scandal in local politics in northern England, Edgar wrote a play for Parr dealing with the anti-apartheid campaign directed against a tour of South African rugby players.
[1] Edgar later described it as a "highly melodramatic piece" that relied on a series of "fairly obvious effects culled from watching the wrong sorts of plays at an impressionable age".
The play is set ostensibly in a university lecture theatre with a professor telling the story of Luxembourg's political journey, culminating with her violent death at the hand of the fascists in 1919.
The ugly sisters, Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins, won't let "Tedderella" (Heath) go to the Common Market Ball when the 1970 general election intervenes.
[17] This was staged as part of a series of events produced by Parr for which Edgar's main contribution was The End, presented as a Cold War Game in the great hall at Bradford University in March 1972.
[1] During the early 1970s, Bradford had what The Guardian called a "burgeoning fringe scene"[11] which included theatre companies with names like the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit and The Welfare State.
Edgar was co-founder of such a group that took the name The General Will Theatre Company which specialised in a "crude and cartoonish" style of political commentary presented with generous dollops of music hall and burlesque for comedic effect.
General Will took several of Edgar's works on tour including The National Interest (1971), a series of sketches showing how the mythical concept of 'The National Interest' can be used to justify sacrifices by the many on behalf of the self-interested few; The Rupert Show (1971), a one-act play set in a church during a service conducted by among others a vicar who also plays Superman, Lord Longford and Judge Argyle, the judge in the Oz obscenity trial, which the title mocks; and State of Emergency (1972), which toured with General Will and also appeared at the Edinburgh Festival and at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, all in 1972, was a one-act documentary with songs about industrial resistance to the Conservative government.
Shortly after the Bloody Sunday shootings in 1972, Edgar collaborated with six friends (Tony Bicat, Brian Clark, Howard Brenton, Francis Fuchs, David Hare and Snoo Wilson) who all, pretending to be on a walking holiday, booked an isolated country cottage for a week where they sat down and wrote a play together.
The Soho Polytechnic was another lunchtime theatre venue where Edgar put on a number of necessarily short plays written for office workers on their lunchbreak but which proved remarkably popular with television producers.
Backshot (1973), written for the Soho Polytechnic was a one-act play in which two small-time crooks are cheated of their loot whilst trying to rob broken vending machines in a motorway cafeteria.
This group later merged with the National Front which, in 1973, won 16% of the vote at the West Bromwich by-election, at which point Edgar decided it was time to write a play about them.
One of them was about a mad king provoking a civil war by dividing his kingdom between his daughters, and the other was Edgar's lightly veiled suggestion that Britain was exposed to a fascist takeover.
Destiny starts in India, on the day of independence, introducing four main characters whose lives intersect thirty years later in a small town in the English West Midlands.
A British Colonel is a dying Conservative MP; a Major who is hoping to succeed him; a Sergeant who is a candidate for a far-right party and an Indian who works in a local foundry.
During the election campaign a strike breaks out at the foundry and the "cosy English ritual" of a local by-election is transformed into a multi-cultural battleground which results in the fascists turning for protection and support to the forces they oppose.
[23] Edgar's comparison of British fascists with German Nazis was condemned as "dishonest" by Peter Jenkins in The Guardian,[11] but the play won the John Whiting Award, presented by the Arts Council for new dramatic writing and was televised by the BBC as part of the Play for Today series in January 1978 with Frederick Treves as the Colonel, Nigel Hawthorne as the Major, Colin Jeavons as the Sergeant, and Saeed Jaffrey as Gurjeet Singh Khera.
The award honoured his outstanding contribution to British playwriting, four decades of service to playwrights, and the instrumental role played in the Writers' Guild's crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The subjects of the fifteen essays included political drama, conservatism of the 1980s, drama-documentary, the National Front, John Osborne, adapting Nicholas Nickleby, the role of public theatre and Live Aid.
The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few.