David Edgar: Playwright and Politician by Elizabeth Swain (review)

Book Reviews 313 ELIZABETH SWAIN, David Edgar: Playwright and Politician. Berne: Peter Lang 1986. Pp. vi, 350. Fearing that he might be labelled a "political author" as he had once been labelled a "Catholic writer," Graham Greene has said, "I suppose I can be called a political writer when I tackle political subjects; but politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God." It is David Edgar's shortcoming as a dramatist that he insists on his classification as a political writer. Yet ifhis works are to transcend a particular time and a particular place - Great Britain in the 19705 - then he must attempt to merit Elizabeth Swain's over-generous estimate of his worth: "In the end what is most vital about Edgar's work is his unquestioning commitment to the lot of humanity, with its mistakes and its possibilities, and the belief that theater is a living forum in which to express that commitment." What is political theater? Greene suggests that the question cannot be answered, Oedipus, Hamlet. The Cherry Orchard are all about the lot of humanity, and a case might be made for each as a political play. Can Henry Hewes be faulted for suggesting that Waiting/or Godor, a play about the bewildering business ofexisting. has characters (Pozzo and Lucky) representative of "Capitalist-Aristocrat" and "Labor-Proletariat" ? From theearly 1970S to the mid-l980s avowed socialist David Edgar has moved from agitprop plays and docudramas highlighting specific political wrongdoings to a more introspective and humane drama, still on occasion relying on agitprop devices, but evoking an emotional as well as an intellectual response as the plays probe ever more deeply into characterization. His plays that have reached the widest audiences beyond the United Kingdom are in fact adaptations rather than original works - Mary Barnes (1978) and Nicholas Nickleby (1980). Whereas Swain and Edgar himself may make a case for both as political theater - the first about the mistreatment of the insane at the hands of the Establishment, the second about the oppression of the downtrodden - both depend on an audience's identification with the central characters whose motivations and actions, unlike those of the cartoon figures of his early works, are psychologically sound. Calling her book David Edgar: Playwright and Politician, Swain, in a worthwhile study of a writer of the second rank, has charted Edgar's remarkable but unfinished journey from the one to the other, from politician to playwright. Edgar admits that the early works were the extent of his political acts. Plays like The Nationallmerest (1971) and The All-Singing All-Talking Golden Oldie Rock Revival Ho Chi Minh Peace Love and Revolution Show (1974) were meant to self~destruct, that is, they were not of lasting interest but addressed immediate issues, and were designed for performances by travelling companies who set up shop in workingmen's clubs and the backrooms of public houses. The limitations of this anarchic, often joyous theater as political action is that more often than not the message reaches the already converted. Edgar, along with others such as David Hare and Howard Brenton, with whom he has collaborated. felt a need to reach wider audiences in larger spaces. Eventually Brenton and Hare found that audience at the National Theatre while Edgar has been championed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the producer of his most ambitious original works. Destiny (1976) and Maydays (1983) as well as the Nicholas Nickleby adaptation. 314 Book Reviews The importance of great subsidized theaters as showcases for someone like Edgar is that, apart from their means ofstaging large-scale productions with huge casts, the press coverage of opening nights at the National or the RSC at the Barbican assures the author of intense, iftemporary, attention that leads to invitations for public lectures and journal articles. The playwright is thereby enabled to engage in political acts beyond the plays themselves. To earn that right, however, the politician gives way to the playwright. Destiny, for example. highlights its characters' public acts in a play about the incursion of neofascism in Britain. Maydays, on the other hand, a play about the failure of Britain's political left wing, produced only...