David Edgar (playwright) - Gaining A Reputation

Gaining A Reputation

Lunchtime theatre is an avant-garde phenomenon that seems to exist on the fringe of the fringe and whose popularity waxes and wanes but never disappears. One series in Glasgow was scheduled for a dozen plays but proved so popular they eventually had over a hundred. In London in the 1970s it had something of a renaissance at The Orange Tree, at the Croydon Warehouse where it proved so popular they didn't bother putting on evening performances for a while, and London's Gay Sweatshop started as a gays-only lunchtime theatre club called Ambience. The Soho Polytechnic was another lunchtime theatre venue where Edgar put on a number of necessarily short plays written for office workers on their lunchbreak but which proved remarkably popular with television producers.

Backshot (1973), written for the Soho Polytechnic was a one-act play in which two small-time crooks are cheated of their loot whilst trying to rob broken vending machines in a motorway cafeteria. This was televised as Sanctuary by Scottish Television in 1973. Baby Love (1973) was written for Leeds Playhouse Theatre where it premiered in March 1973 then transferred to the Soho Polytechnic Lunchtime Theatre. It was a one-act play in which Eileen, after the still birth of her illegitimate baby, steals a baby at random and is sentenced to nine months in prison, where Valium is found to be the answer. This was televised by the BBC as part of their Play for Today series in November 1974, with Patti Love as Eileen.

Whilst working as a journalist in Bradford, Edgar came across a group led by an ex-conservative councillor that called itself the Yorkshire Campaign to Stop Immigration. This group apparently, "addressed many real needs and some real fears" by holding meetings at which they showed films upside down with no sound. This group later merged with the National Front which, in 1973, won 16% of the vote at the West Bromwich by-election, at which point Edgar decided it was time to write a play about them. Destiny (1976) was the result. Edgar had wanted it to be produced in a big repertory theatre in a multi-racial city but it was instead picked up by Ron Daniels at the Royal Shakespeare Company who produced it at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, which Edgar described as, "a tin hut in rural Warwickshire". From there it transferred to the RSC's London home, The Aldwych Theatre, opening in May 1977 at the height of the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations and just after the National Front won almost 120,000 votes in London's local elections.

That summer, Britain was in the throes of the Queen's Silver Jubilee and West End theatre audience figures suffered as a consequence, with only two shows managing to hold their own during Jubilee week, both of which were at the Aldwych. One of them was about a mad king provoking a Civil War by dividing his kingdom between his daughters, and the other was Edgar's lightly veiled suggestion that Britain was exposed to a fascist takeover. The play was picketed by a group of neo-fascists waving union flags that echoed the patriotic bunting on the front of the theatre, and small scuffles broke out between these pickets and the emerging theatre audience.

The play itself was an attempt to answer the question: How can a movement espousing the ideology that the UK had defied during the war gain purchase in postwar Britain? Destiny starts in India, on the day of independence, introducing four main characters whose lives intercept thirty years later in a small town in the English West Midlands. A British Colonel is a dying Conservative MP; a Major who is hoping to succeed him; a Sergeant who is a candidate for a far-right party and an Indian who works in a local foundry. During the election campaign a strike breaks out at the foundry and the "cosy English ritual" of a local by-election is transformed into a multi-cultural battleground which results in the fascists turning for protection and support to the forces they oppose.

Edgar's comparison of British fascists with German Nazis was condemned as "dishonest" by Peter Jenkins in The Guardian, but the play won the John Whiting Award, presented by the Arts Council for new dramatic writing and was televised by the BBC as part of the Play for Today series in January 1978 with Frederick Treves as the Colonel and Nigel Hawthorne as the Major.