| Lifetime Award for Five Decades of Writing & Advocacy for Writers |
David Edgar |
| Playwright, Teacher, Campaigner , Theatre of England and Wales , February 23, 2023 |
AWARD & MILESTONEDavid Edgar celebrates a milestone age on 26th February. In January he received an Outstanding Contribution Award at the Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards. The award honoured an outstanding contribution to British playwriting, decades of service to playwrights, and the instrumental role played in the Writers' Guild's crisis response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Edgar was president of the Guild from 2007 to 2013 and architect of the Writers' Guild's New Play Commission Scheme. The career has been of a remarkable length with over sixty plays across stage, radio, television. Thirty-seven plays have been published in addition to books on play-writing and politics. The Royal Shakespeare Company has premiered more plays of his than any other playwright. He was Resident Playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974-5, a board member from 1985, Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic 1978-9, Literary Consultant for the Royal Shakespeare Company 1984-8 and Honorary Associate Artist, 1989. He founded the University of Birmingham's MA in Playwriting Studies in 1989 and was its director until 1999. He was appointed Professor of Playwriting Studies in 1995. A lifelong advocate for writers and play-writing Edgar was raised in Birmingham, studied in Manchester and lived in Bradford before returning to Birmingham. The Door, the studio theatre at the Birmingham Rep, was a pioneer in diversity of theatre. More writers of minority heritage were premiered there than in the rest of the country put together. CRITICAL ASSESSMENT There is no biography of David Edgar nor memoir. The critics have praised the breadth and sense of scale that courses through the work. For the audience there has been a sense of exhilaration at this quality of epic. David Ian Rabey, in an early study, linked Edgar to the Shavian tradition of ideas in contest. But whereas Shaw exudes a spirit of levity an Edgar drama knows that ideas are serious. In an Edgar play humans are driven by their inner ideas but these are never playful. They have consequence. The spread of the work has been large. “The Shape of the Table” (1990) and “Continental Divide” (2002) are the best of modern theatre of politics in action. In “Pentecost” (1994) he caught a current of the age. A group of migrants- a Palestinian, Kurds, Afghans, Sri Lankans, Azeris, Latvians- invade a church, hold the occupants hostage and threaten to destroy a unique fresco. In “Testing the Echo” (2008) the two dozen characters include the names Chong, Tetyana, Halima, Mahmood, Dragoslav, Muna, Jasminka, Aziz, Samir, Ranjit, Samir, Nasim. The languages on stage are Somali, Korean, Arabic, Albanian. From Congo, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Pakistan, Serbia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe the characters' common bond is preparation for the Home Office's Citizenship Test. A question asks: “How many members are there in the Welsh Assembly?” Meanwhile Britons declare: “We don’t have to pass the test. We don’t have to!” TEACHER & ACTIVIST Edgar has described his first experience of theatre. He was nearly four when taken to “Beauty and the Beast.” He screamed at the first entrance. But he wrote: “I wanted to be one of the magicians. But I didn't realise exactly what kind of magician, what kind of job I wanted in the theatre, until, in my late teens, I discovered what I wanted it for. Making magic real is what it's always been about.” Although he has written for the screen the overwhelming dedication has been to live performance. His advocacy of playwrighting and teaching for theatre was crystallised in “How Plays Work” (2009). The book's taut 205 pages reveal much of the implicit aesthetics. Edgar's approach is low on theory and high on example. His concern is theatre that has fused with audiences. He cites E M Forster on the difference between prose and theatre. He quotes Peter Brook: “Life in the theatre is more readable and intense because it is more concentrated.” He digs deep into time and structure. Drama balances the expected, represented by format and genre, with the surprising, as played out in reversals, disruptions, twists. In an era of information surfeit and intensity of subjectivity he looks to the art-form's essence: “Drama's capacity to point up connections is one of the reasons it has - historically - been so successful in comparing and contrasting different worlds: the objective and the subjective, the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the worlds of the family and the state. Drama can bridge the two great sources of our experience: our direct, lived, first-person experience and knowledge that is presented to us second- or third- hand.” EDGAR ON WRITING IN 2023 Edgar, long-standing advocate for the art of play-writing, was interviewed by Matthew Hemley in the Stage 17th January 2023. Among the topics he lamented the drop in new drama. In answer to “What is your take on the state of new writing in the UK at the moment?” his response was: “Research I was involved in in the early 2010s showed that the work being presented was predominantly new work and indeed new plays. Even without devised work, the majority of theatre experiences that people went to see, not only in terms of productions but also performances and in terms of seats sold, were new p lays. “This was an extraordinary change from when I was small, when it was about 20% of new plays if you were lucky. That has been the number one big change of this century. “Most plays, and indeed looking at the marvellous 18 plays that the New Play Commission Scheme finances, are political theatre – a lot of the commissions were about agency, a lot of them were about women, people of colour and women of colour taking on obstacles and overcoming them, and it’s clear that is now what the theatre is about. “And that has affected the conventional mainstream theatre – in its presumptions, its casting policies and employment policies – in a way that would have been impossible to dream of 20 years ago. But that seems to have been thrown into reverse and there were signs of that when lockdown ended. Lots of really major theatres that should have functioning literary departments don’t even have a literary manager any more and then you don’t have the mechanism to commission new work.” * * * * The two Davids, Edgar and Hare, are eight months apart in age and are often talked about together. The work of David Hare has been described as: “the repeated collision of individual idealism with public political cynicism impacts social entropy into a sense of personal deadlock or disintegration for these characters.” Hare declares that country and theatre are in stasis. Edgar records the dynamic of change, the key line in “Trying It On” of 2018: “The stuff of politics expanded outward to the planet and inward to the person.” Two characters show the difference. In “Plenty” (1978) Hare's hapless Brock says “Mostly we do what people expect of us. Mostly it's wrong.” In “Maydays” (1983) Edgar closes with Amanda saying: “In the end what we are all trying to do, in our many different ways, can only be accounted for by something in the nature of our species which resents, rejects and ultimately will resist a world that is demonstrably and in this case dramatically wrong and mad and unjust and unfair.” Humans are driven by their convictions. But idea in art is one element. Edgar's depictions of the great currents of time, and their effect on individuals, have never been didactic. David Ian Rabey caught the essence- the prowess of both art and craft- at a mid-stage in the career: “His distinctive skills are his deft expositions, establishments of character, engagement and management of audience sympathies and highly theatrical sense of narrative counterpoint.” SOURCES & REFERENCES David Edgar “The Second Time as Farce” (Lawrence & Wishart 1988) David Edgar “How Plays Work” (Nick Hern Books 2009) Statement about the Door: personal conversation 24th March 2013. Dominic Dromgoole has a more critical assessment of Edgar in his “the Full Room” (Methuen 2000). David Ian Rabey is markedly more insightful in “English Drama Since 1940” (Longman 2003) and “David Edgar” (Book Trust-British Council 1989). David Edgar given Writers' Guild Outstanding Contribution Award: https://www.rsc.org.uk/news/david-edgar-given-writers-guild-outstanding-contribution-award Previous articles below: 26th October 2019: "Last Summer", Edgar's play of 1980s Wales 4th October 2019: “Trying In On”, Edgar's scrutiny of the roots of the 2016 Referendum 31 May 2019: “How Plays Work”, Edgar's summation of his teaching approach 18 June 2008: “Testing the Echo”, Edgar's award-winning play on multicultural Britain |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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