| A Look-back and Guide |
David Edgar |
| David Edgar , Theatre of England and Wales , March 6, 2024 |
David Edgar has been a monumental presence in theatre. In Aberystwyth he has been both performer and public speaker. The article of 23 February 2023 is headed “Lifetime Award for Decades of Writing & Advocacy for Writers.” “David 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, four 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. “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!” * * * * 26 October 2019: "Last Summer", Edgar's play of 1980s Wales “The best chronicle of political Wales in the 1980's belongs is a part of the legacy of David Edgar. “That Summer” (1987) is set on a stated date, 12th August 1984. Two fifteen-year olds from the Rhondda, Frankie and Michelle, are hosted by Cressida and Howard in their holiday home in Gwynedd. Their father, Alun, is en route to picket the power station at Heysham. “The play contains much of life in Wales at the time. Frankie has a grandmother from Guernica, frightened by aircraft for the rest of her life. There is a lament for the Miners Institutes losing their libraries. The banner of the Lodge reads “Let Us Reason Together”. Terry, a teacher in his mid-30s, keeps a badge with a pink triangle in his pocket but does not dare to wear it "Michele tells her hosts of home: “Friendliness. Like everybody caring for each other. Walk along the street, know everybody, say hello. But it can be -restricted. Rather tight. If you don't fit. I mean, there's people who can't wait to go. I mean, I know I did wrong, making jokes 'bout being queer and stuff like that. But a bloke, being queer, in a mining village, he'd not last five minutes. Really.” "To which Terry replies: “No I didn't. Didn't last five minutes.” “This is not the language of 2019. But as Simon Callow put it in “Being An Actor”: “What is valuable about dramatic literature is that it constitutes a living record of other lives and other worlds. It is live history: and by failing to take the pains to discover the Atlantis that it represents, we turn o”ur back on history, on the richness of culture and the lessons of the past.” * * * * 4th October 2019: “Trying In On” The heading is “Dramatist Takes to the Stage to Tackle the Referendum.” “Trying It On” does not have the sweep of a large cast but Frankie Bradshaw's design fills the ample space of Aberystwyth's main stage. Edgar is the writer as craftsman; the last thing theatre is about is talk. Good writers use things, props, to make action. This dramatist-performer has photographs and film at his disposal, even balloons to pop. “The first years out of the family home are the ones that make the impact. Edgar was aged twenty in Manchester in the year of cataclysm that was 1968. The bombing in Cambodia may have been secret but Paris was the site of violent urban battle. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were gunned down. In England a generation of lifelong activists was finding its first voice. The faces of Anna Coote, Hilary Wainwright, Paul Mason, Tariq Ali, Martin Jacques, David Aaronovitch and others appear on screen in testimony. The names that follow range wide. From here Alfred Sherman, from across the Atlantic Kristol and Podhoretz. In his combative intellectual battles Gore Vidal had the habit of referring to him as “Poddy.” “It is the nature of artists to face truth and Edgar does it. Populism prevails over social democracy, because it uses the economic language of social democracy. Authority will dispense welfare largesse for the collective, while insisting that the collective has no truck with identity issues. “Art is not a lecture; when it wants to be, it dies. It is raising the questions that matter. The autopsies of the last three years, all those millions of words, are unsatisfactory. The root in ecology is unmentioned. Simplicity displaces complexity; that is how it is. Representative democracy exists to grapple with complexity.” * * * * 31 May 2019: “How Plays Work” “The pleasure is in the punch of style, the breadth of reference and the company of the author. If he is austere even slightly alarming in person, in print he is generous and far-seeing. John Godber even receives a commendation for his mastery of a particular strand of play. Edgar's approach is low on theory and high on example. His concern is theatre that has fused with audiences. He cites a philosopher, Mary Midgley, but only as a comment on the nature of evil. He brings in the makers of rules from Aristotle and Vauquelin to Syd Field. Anthony Minghella took pride in “The English Patient” being used as an example of how not to write a script. The Robert McKee prescriptive formula, says Edgar, damaged BBC drama. McKee, he says, now accepts open and closed endings, multiple protagonists, non-linear time “The eight brisk chapters are thematic: audiences, actions, characters, genre, structure, scenes, devices, endings. The theatre he draws on for illustration vaults the centuries. How Etherege, Goldsmith and Sheridan did what they did is still valid for today. But classics are outnumbered by dramatists of now: Crimp, Eldridge, Griffiths, Keatley, Lavery, Nichols, Penhall, Ravenhill, Shaffer, Shinn, Roy Williams are just a sample. Edgar writes a lot of theatre but manifestly sees a lot too.” * * * * 18 June 2008: ““Testing the Echo” “What is the capital of Scotland? Is it (a) Penzance or (b) Aberystwyth?” The setting, in scene thirty–two of David Edgar’s pulsating new play on nationality, citizenship and language, is an anonymous workplace canteen. Aspirant British citizen Chong enjoys a matey relationship with his fellow workers Derek, Chloe and Joshua; the question is a piece of jokey “assistance” they give him as he prepares for his Citizenship Test. Chong opts for “Aberystwyth”. “This quartet is just four from two dozen characters in Out of Joint’s exuberant production. Historians and civil servants, local officials and middle class dinner party guests tumble on stage, played with speed and versatility by the company of four women and four men. "The core of 'Testing the Echo” is the quicksand of language that belies the pile-up of facts. A historian stands up and calls for “a halt to the long and baleful period of national apology.” Another says of citizenship - “an almost perfect way to destroy two thousand years of British culture, history and tradition.” The play reminds us anyhow that the history of Britishness is ripe with uncertainty. The United Kingdom in its present form dates from 1921. The first institution to be named British was a bank. The first time a monarch lay in state in Westminster Abbey was in 1910.” “Criticism has begun to take David Edgar for granted but there is no-one to match his particular blend of ambition and intellect. In its dozens of sharp scenes with little in the way of scenery or set pieces 'Testing the Echo” is not about emotional intensity; that is not its point. What the audience gets to see is the world around that it never sees, the Pole behind the counter in Londis, the Kurd selling “the Big Issue,” the Czechs picking apples in Herefordshire. To see that world that we hardly see up on stage is exhilarating in itself.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 13 times There are 5 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
