| David Edgar Drama of 1980s Wales |
David Edgar |
| Playwright, Performer, Speaker , Theatre of Wales , October 26, 2019 |
The appearance of David Edgar on the stage of Theatr y Gwerin, below 4th October 2019, rounds out a relationship with Wales. He has lectured in Aberystwyth, he has met with students of theatre, and he is author of the best play of politics and Wales not written in Wales. As a guest speaker at the Drwm in the National Library he gave an address that was a tour de force of forty years of political thought and action. “Trying It On” had been well received before it arrived at Aberystwyth. In England Michael Billington wrote: “The playwright’s imagined confrontation with the political activist he was 50 years ago is a triumph of confessional courage – and relentless optimism...The first striking thing is the honesty of the piece. “The 70-year-old Edgar imagines a confrontation with his 20-year-old self when he was a political activist at Manchester University... the fervent socialism of the 60s is now channelled into a host of disparate movements including feminism, racial equality and environmental issues. Idealism, Edgar suggests, is not dead. It has simply changed its focus and tactics....A resonant phrase captures his undimmed optimism: “Politics extends outwards to the planet and inwards to the personality.” At the Edinburgh Fringe the Skinny called it “a thoughtful, self-questioning play of ceaseless invention.” Festmag reported: “Now 71, the prolific playwright is appearing on stage for the first time since university to inform his younger self of the baby boomers' rapturous embrace of neoliberalism and his own move to the mainstream after his radical beginnings in agitprop theatre. Edgar is an avuncular stage presence but the show is far from cosy...what initially appears to be a glorified TED Talk becomes infinitely more thorny and thought-provoking. Self-aware and pin-sharp, Edgar delivers a personal and political play that's more radical than his 20-year-old firebrand self could ever imagine.” * * * * Politics of another era appear in the third print collection of plays. "Maydays" is his epic whose action spans 40 years. 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 plays 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 our back on history, on the richness of culture and the lessons of the past.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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