David Edgar has been creating lines for other people to recite for 50 years, but the man described by the Royal Shakespeare Company as one of the UK’s greatest living writers is set to make his professional stage debut.
The playwright, who celebrates his 70th birthday on Monday, will star in an autobiographical and political one-man show this summer at the RSC in Stratford and the Royal Court theatre in London. The seasons will follow a premiere in the Midlands where he lives – performing at the Warwick Arts Centre and the Birmingham Repertory theatre.
It marks a dramatic gear-change for a writer whose award-winning RSC collaborations include political dramas such as Pentecost, part of a trilogy about post-communist eastern Europe, and his Charles Dickens adaptation, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, starring Roger Rees.
Acting is in Edgar’s blood. His mother and father were both actor-stage managers, and he dreamed of treading the boards from childhood: “My parents met on the stage-door steps of the Birmingham Repertory theatre … so without theatre, I wouldn’t exist. I was going to the theatre since I can remember.”
Edgar added: “I discovered I wasn’t very good at [acting]. I went to university with the ambition to become a director. I discovered I wasn’t very good at that. I came to writing because I wanted to work in theatre, not [because] I wanted to write.”
His one-man show, titled Trying It On, explores the legacy of the 1968 generation. The year in which demonstrations against the Vietnam war, Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech and the assassination of Martin Luther King took place helped to define Edgar’s politics and shape his writing.
The show will involve the 70-year-old playwright being confronted by his 20-year-old self, asking whether they share the same beliefs, and if not, what has changed.
“The play is, in a way, a conversation between my older and younger self,” Edgar said. “This year is the 50th anniversary of 1968, when I was 20. I became caught up in the anti-Vietnam war movement in particular, the worldwide student revolt against the establishment, which happened in many countries. That was my formative political experience because, perhaps uniquely, that movement was caught up with other changes in society – clothes, hair, music ... the rest of my life in a way has been a negotiation with what I believed then.”
In the play, he will ask himself: “Have I sold out? Am I still the same person I was then?” He will also ask his 20-year-old self what “most appals” him about his beliefs today.
He added: “We all have something that, if you’d any kind of radical youth, there’s going to be things you said that kind of embarrass you ... But similarly, you can see your 20-year-old [self] looking back at you now and being a bit outraged at things that you now believe and indeed the life-choices that you’ve made.”
His play has been developed partly through interviewing activists past and present, including Tariq Ali. The production will be directed by Christopher Haydon.
Edgar’s 70th birthday year sees revivals of his acclaimed shows, including his adaptations of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, currently touring, and A Christmas Carol, which returns to the RSC in December.
At 26, Edgar penned a knockabout parody Richard III pureed with Watergate. Called Dick Deterred, it had a short run in London in 1974.
Five years later, Nixon was making his return to public life, and an early launchpad was the Oxford Union Society. So an undergraduate colleague of mine decided to mount a revival of Edgar's play.
Edgar got the word, and was so pleased he came up from London for the week to play piano with the band. He was a funny, charming man, and it was evident he would become A Big Deal.
I was cast as the H.R. Haldeman character, Buckingham. The show was one of six openings around Oxford in one night and ran for a week in the spring of 1979.
I proved a pretty good song-and-dance man. Alas, the paragraph mentioning my performance was excised by that term's arts editor of The Cherwell, Garry Bell, the little shit. He thought, inexplicably, that would diminish my standing as a potential rival for the editorship.
But it was a fun experience. One evening at the interval, as the cast mingled with the audience, a lady told me, "You have the most wonderful American accent! How long have you been practicing it?"
"24 years, ma'am," I replied.
The New York Times wrote of the play's New York run in 1983:
YOU get the idea of ''Dick Deterred,'' a musical at the No Smoking Playhouse commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Watergate affair, right from its punning name, a play on Shakespeare's ''Richard III,'' which provides the format from which this takeoff takes off.
The book and lyrics for this clever political satire are by David Edgar, who adapted ''Nicholas Nickleby'' from novel to stage, and by William Schimmel, who wrote the music and who plays the accordion and piano in musical accompaniment during performance. Mr. Edgar wrote the piece in Britain in 1974, while the Watergate scandal was still a burning issue. Mr. Schimmel has written new music for this United States premiere.
Mr. Edgar has drawn his dialogue - elegantly and often wittily - from a Shakespearean matrix, although the story is Watergate. The characters wear business suits that, at bottom, become vestigial knee breeches, with long stockings and courtly shoes. Richard Nixon is a sly, evil Richard, surrounded by courtiers no less machinating. John Lord Hastings is a corporation lawyer, later Attorney General. H.R. (Bob) Buckingham is an advertising executive, later White House Chief of Staff. Eugene McClarence, duke and Senator from Minnesota, is done in by Richard, Mayor of Chicago.
It is a novel conceit, well carried out under the direction of George Wolf Reily, and Mr. Schimmel's eclectic score matches the comedy very well. There are, however, two drawbacks, both in terms of time. History -which like antiques, often changes function with time - has taken a toll. It is savage comedy that met its moment of history, but today it seems somewhat of an overkill for viewers who have lived through the 10 intervening years. Also, it tends to be overlong; once one has gotten the idea, the show, in its second half, tends to be overdrawn.
Steve Pudenz is a remarkably good caricature of Mr. Nixon, down to voice and to the very familiar workings of the Presidential face. He leers and conspires expertly, so that the double duty of playing the Watergate figure and Richard III at the same time is executed strikingly. Sylvester Rich, as Buckingham, conveys, with comic overtones, the ruthlessness of chief hatchet man. Mary Kay Dean, who plays the Republican Party and also Martha, wife to Hastings, the Queen of Washington, sings and acts with considerable charm.
''Dick Deterred'' lends itself to -and its comedic political commentary is better suited to - an informal cabaret surrounding, rather than the more formal confines of a theater. As it is, it is a bit too much of a good thing, somewhat late in going to press. The Cast DICK DETERRED, book and lyrics by David Edgar; music by William Schimmel; directed by George Wolf Reily; costume design, Marla Kaye; set design, Ted Reinert and Beate Kes- sler; lighting design, Leslie Ann Kilian; choreography, Mary Pat Henry; executive producer, Lily Turner. Presented by Merry Enterprises Theater, Norman Thomas Marshall, artistic director. At the William Redfield Theater, 354 West 45th Street. WITH Mary Kay Dean, Elf Fairservis, Malcolm Gray, Richard Litt, Steve Pudenz, Ted Reinert, Sylvester Rich, Rhonda Rose and Carl Williams.
It's available for a fortnight's borrow here.
In one final twining of people and places, The Guardian reports,
This week, he will also join Helena Kennedy QC in launching an appeal for a charity set up by his late wife, Eve Brook, shortly before her death 20 years ago. She had chaired social services on Birmingham city council and, after learning that she had terminal lung cancer, set up a charity, the Eve Brook Scholarship Fund, to help the city’s teenagers who had been in care to go to university. It has helped 180 people.
Baroness Kennedy is retiring this year as principal of Mansfield College, where I met David Edgar in rehearsals in the college chapel so long ago.
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