David Edgar (playwright) - Early Theatre Pieces

Early Theatre Pieces

Initially, Edgar's career as a journalist developed alongside his attempts to write plays. In 1970, soon after moving to Bradford to take up his role with the Argus, he met Chris Parr, a Fellow in Theatre at Bradford University, who was able to commission aspiring playwrights and produce their works with the Bradford University Theatre Group, the company consisting of university students. 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. Before the play was accepted, however, the tour was called off.

On the strength of this, Parr commissioned Edgar to write a play for two student actresses to perform at the Edinburgh Festival. The result was Two Kinds of Angel, a one-act play that received its Bradford premiere in July 1970, was revived at the Basement Theatre in London and led to more commissions from Parr for the Bradford Theatre Group. Two Kinds of Angel is set in a flat where the squabbles of the two main characters are inter cut with flashbacks to the lives of their respective alter egos. Rosa is a student revolutionary who re-enacts episodes from the life of Rosa Luxemburg, while her flatmate Norma is a blond actress re-enacting the life of Marilyn Monroe. 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." "It wasn't very good", Edgar admits. He re-used the character of Rosa Luxemburg in his first full-length work, Bloody Rosa, produced by students of Manchester University at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1971. The play is set ostensibly in a university lecture theatre with a professor telling the story of Luxemburg's political journey, culminating with her violent death at the hand of the fascists in 1919. Edgar added the dramatic twist that events were being regularly interrupted by the students to question the professor's version of events.

Further material followed in quick succession and by the end of 1971 Edgar had seen eight of his plays performed, including A Truer Shade of Blue (1970), a one-act play in which two businessmen visit a Soho strip club where they encounter a stripper/waitress whose story changes their perception of such entertainment; Still Life: Man in Bed (1971), produced at the Pool Theatre, Edinburgh, and again at the Little Theatre, London in 1972 is a one-act re-working of the theme of Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov (1859), in which the hero remains in bed for 79 days unable to cope with the decimalisation of currency; Acid (1971) for Parr's Bradford University Theatre Group then again at the Edinburgh Festival in 1971 is a one-act play that has a copycat of the Charles Manson massacre take place after a 1970 pop festival on the Isle of Wight; Tedderella (1971) at the Pool Theatre, Edinburgh then again at the Bush Theatre London in 1973 is a one act pantomime transposing political events in the life of British Prime Minister Ted Heath into a pantomime reminiscent of Cinderella. 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.

During this period, Edgar continued to work as a full-time journalist and even found time to do some acting with Parr's group in parts such as the title role in Toad of Toad Hall and Flashman in Richard Crane's adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays (1971). Edgar's acting also ran to playing God in Howard Brenton's Scott of the Antarctic (1971), a mock "cabaret on ice" in which Scott is confronted by the Devil on a motorbike with Hells Angels trying to stop his expedition to the South Pole. 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 Birmingham University in March 1972. On the stage, scenes in a nuclear submarine were being played out whilst in the hall itself Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marchers and various political figures including John F. Kennedy, Hugh Gaitskell and Bertrand Russel, are spending the night in a school hall during their march to Aldermaston. Meanwhile, computer monitors permitted the audience to contribute to the action and the ending varied each evening according to the decisions made by the spectators.

During the early 1970s, Bradford had what The Guardian called a "burgeoning fringe scene" 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. General Will came to a halt when the only gay member of the company took exception to the heterosexual slant of the material and went on strike in mid-performance. They did, however, lead to Edgar's first foreign premiere.

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 pretended to be on a walking holiday and booked an isolated country cottage for a week where they sat down and wrote a play together. They took what later came to be termed the "firing squad" approach to playwriting. In a firing squad one member of the party has a blank round, and since no member knows who this is none of them need assume responsibility for the killing. Edgar and his friends tried to write in a style as similar to the others as possible so none of them need take responsibility for his contribution to the play. The result was England's Ireland (1972), an episodic look at the history of the British in Northern Ireland with different episodes shown from different perspectives. This received its world premiere at the hands of the Shoot Theatre Company at the Mickery Theatre, Amsterdam, in 1972 and later the same year transferred to the Round House Theatre in London.

By now, Edgar was receiving commissions from repertory theatres and small touring groups resulting in Excuses Excuses (1972) for the Belgrade Theatre Studio, Coventry and later revived by OpenSpace Theatre, London in 1973 and then revived as Fired (1975) by Second City Theatre Company was a debate on the motives for arson committed in protest at redundancies at a local factory; Rent or Caught in the Act (1972), at the Unity Theatre, London was about housing conditions for the working classes; Road to Hanoi (1972) produced on tour by Paradise Foundry Theatre Company, London, was a ten-minute play written with Howard, Wandor and Snoo Wilson about Bob Hope's 1971 visit to Hanoi to attempt to buy back American POWs; In 1972 Edgar decided to put the journalism to one side and took to being a playwright full-time.