David Edgar
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2006
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is a playwright whose work has chronicled Britain's changing political landscape over the past 30 years. David Edgar was brought up in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, but was radicalised during the 1960s and has never looked back. In 1976, he examined the right-wing National Front movement in Destiny, a play for the RSC. It was his first award-winning play and the work of which to date he is the most proud.
His interest in theatre goes back to his childhood; his parents both had theatrical connections and his father even turned a garden shed into an elaborate theatre. It was here that as a boy he was to star in plays in which he cast himself in the leading role. Despite the shift of politics to the centre ground, he remains committed to the left-wing cause and to exploring the difference between utopia and reality. He also writes for TV and radio, and his plays are regularly performed on the international as well as the British stage.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Cum Sancto Spiritu - With the Holy Ghost by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan Luxury: A piano
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a playwright. He's been writing plays since the age of five ever since his father built a 12-seater theatre in the garden shed. Unashamedly political, he's championed the left-wing cause from the moment he started working with |
| 0:43.8 | Agit Prop Theatre in Bradford in the early 70s. He came to national attention with |
| 0:48.6 | destiny, a play about the National Front, written in 1976. |
| 0:53.2 | Despite his popular success with Nicholas Nickleby written for the RSC, he's preferred to plow |
| 0:58.7 | a political furrow in the main, most notably with that summer about the minor strike and a trilogy |
| 1:04.2 | about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. His Marxist beliefs may have taken a |
| 1:09.4 | bit of a pummeling over the last 16 years or so and his political dreams become somewhat |
| 1:14.4 | unfashionable but he remains self-assured and confident. It continues to be |
| 1:19.7 | important he says to look at a mysterious and dangerous world and try to make sense of it. |
| 1:25.8 | He is David Edgar. |
| 1:28.2 | You came to fame, as I've indicated, David, as a playwright who advocated left-wing change but that was easier in the days of the |
| 1:34.1 | minors strike in a three-day week and so on. Politics is much less divisive these days |
| 1:39.6 | it's much more difficult to write political theatre really isn't it? I think it was. |
| 1:43.9 | I think politics came back with the vengeance with 9-11 really when people suddenly |
| 1:48.8 | were reminded that politics could kill. |
| 1:51.6 | I think for 20 years, you know, the remit of politics. that politics had reduced. |
| 1:55.0 | had reduced. |
| 1:56.0 | But I think generally you're right. |
| 1:58.0 | I think the last 30 years have seen a decline in the power of the public realm in general. |
| 2:04.0 | Well, it's a decline in the extremes of politics, isn't it? |
... |
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