In conversation with David Edgar

Ann Hogben reports on a Guild event that saw the new President of the Writers’ Guild in conversation with Guild Theatre Commitee Chairman, David James. 

David Edgar came from a theatrical family – his parents met on the stage door steps of the Birmingham Rep and he still feels strong ties to that theatre.

He read drama at Manchester University, intending to become a director. At the time, Manchester was a hotbed of political activity and he became involved in the student protest movement. Having been the editor of the university newspaper he became a journalist in Bradford after finishing his studies.

He recalled the extraordinary Bradford Festival of 1971 that opened his eyes to how theatre might be a force for change in society. With that, he abandoned journalism and became a playwright.

It was a time of great turmoil and theatre seemed to be the most radical place to work. The Lord Chancellor’s censorship of theatre ended in 1968 and it is difficult now to realise what an extraordinary repressing effect it had had. Overnight theatre went from being one of the most repressed industries for a writer to work for to the most free.

Following Belfast’s Bloody Sunday, David Edgar joined a group of other writers who formed what they ironically called “a Walking Party”, in order to be able to book an isolated cottage for an extended period. They spent a week there and thrashed out a play together. The result was England’s Ireland.

The collective writing process they adopted was based on the notion of the blank shot in a firing squad, meaning that no individual need take the responsibility for being the one to shoot the fatal bullet. In the same way, each playwright could contribute without taking individual responsibility for the most controversial scenes. He found it was probably the best training for a playwright – to be marooned with six other writers until you start to write like other members of the collective!

Revolution

In that period revolution seemed like a very real possibility. It was a very apocalyptic time and he became attracted to Trostskyism, which allowed its adherents to evade responsibility for any actually existing socalist or communist regime. However, as information about the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution began to filter through, it became increasingly clear that this was not a serious position.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 a lot of people believed it would lead to some kind of social democracy. With that, he had to confront the reality that the dream he had invested in since his youth had failed and he had to work out what this meant. He wrote The Shape of the Table, Pentecost and The Prisoner’s Dilemma in order to explore both not only the collapse of communism but the increasingly important issues of multi-culturalism, refugees and conflict resolution.

He thinks one of the best things about British Theatre is that directors tend to direct a play as it is written and not to re-create it according to their own vision. As a result, there are more theatre writers in this country than anywhere else.

Despite periodic media hype declaring that theatre is dead, a new wave of playwrights seems to arrive every few years.

David James commented that in the Guild’s dialogue with the Arts Council they hear a lot about the importance of accessibility and devised theatre and asked for his opinion on this. He discussed the merits of the Arts Council’s Boyden Report. He went on to talk about the new Theatre of Fact or Verbatim Theatre that presents documents to the audience, apparently leaving them to make up their own minds about the issues of the day without making an overt judgement. David says there is nothing new about it, in fact, it’s been around since the 1950s. David said that the problem with basing theatre very closely on fact is that any deviation from that can be rather a disappointment. When he writes, he often uses fact as inspiration and creates a fiction around it.

Major issues

David James asked him what sort of subject he wanted to tackle next. “Of the major issues, the elephant in the room is obviously Islam. In Eastern Europe, Putin reviving the Cold War. It is very difficult to dramatise environmental issues though these are the most pressing issues of our day. There is an internationalism now in the way people think.”

David James asked if he thought there was now too much “script development” going on with Literary Managers. David Edgar said he sees a danger of a “filmification “of the British Theatre. Dramaturgs can suck all the life out of theatre. He said the German definition of a dramaturg was someone who turns living writers into dead ones!

Asked if he intended writing about more personal subjects, David said that was not his usual area. When he was bereaved ten years ago he decided not to write about the experience directly. Instead he wrote a play about someone caring for someone with memory loss, dealing with the tendency of carers to want to make the patient in their own image.

Asked about how his play Destiny came about David explained that during the 1970s the National Front were not regarded as any serious threat. Guardian commentators thought they were just an anti-immigrant pressure group; the left felt they weren’t addressing real issues. It was a time of serious inflation and social upheaval and although the National Front leaders were Nazis, they were addressing the concerns of certain dispossessed sections of society.

He was initially commissioned to write the play for the Nottingham Playhouse who turned it down, he rewrote the play for the Birmingham Rep who also decided not to stage but, but it was taken up by Trevor Nunn at the RSC who programmed it at the Other Place and transferred it to the Aldwych Theatre in London. It was the summer of the Silver Jubilee and ironically the poster for the play was festooned with Union Jacks while the country was covered in Union Jacks. The unexpected publicity helped bring the attention of the wider public to the play. He said “It was the only thing I’ve written that can quantifiably be seen to have changed things. It made people aware that the National Front was a real threat and things changed thereafter.”

Asked about self-censorship, he agreed that this was a regrettable factor in the way writers worked now. He cited the appalling treatment received by the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti after her play, Behzti, was performed at Birmingham Rep two years ago. It was physically attacked by some members of the Sikh community, resulting in the closure of the play, and the writer having to go into hiding.

There was a sense that playwriting could be a dangerous activity and he was concerned that, either consciously or not, some writers were now deliberately avoiding confronting difficult subjects. He said he was currently tackling the subject of self-censorship and wanted to find ways of dramatising this effectively.

Anne Hogben is the Guild's Deputy General Secretary.

Article published: 21.06.2007