NHB Modern Plays
3 total works
It’s 1968. David is twenty. It is the height of the worldwide student revolt. The Vietnam war rages. Enoch Powell delivers his 'Rivers of Blood' speech. Martin Luther King is assassinated. These events will define David’s politics and give focus to his writing.
It’s fifty years on. The seventy-year-old is confronted by the twenty-year old. Do they share the same beliefs? If not, is it the world that’s changed, or him?
David Edgar's Trying It On is an autobiographical monologue, written to be performed by its author.
It was first presented by Warwick Arts Centre and China Plate, touring the UK in 2018, including performances at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the Midlands Arts Centre and at the Royal Court Theatre, London – as well as at the Royal Shakespeare Company, alongside the RSC's revival of Edgar's landmark play Maydays.
It's the 2000s. We're in a faraway country. Rachel, a stellar American political strategist, and Caro, her British data expert, have been hired to fight a ferocious election, in a place where it's hard to tell what's real and what's fake.
They think they're here to teach the Eastern Europeans how to do democracy, but it turns out they're here to learn. And when Rachel's former political partner turns up on the rival side, their showdown threatens to change global politics, from Warsaw to Wisconsin. Forever.
The New Real is David Edgar's epic, panoramic play about how the political fault-line was redrawn. It is an origin story, for right now. It was first performed in 2024 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Headlong at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Holly Race Roughan.
'Edgar's writing has a vigour, a swagger, a taut, tense texture that portrays men and women in the white heat of ambition, duplicity, conscience and tortured idealism' Sunday Times
'There is no more incisive commentator on politics currently working in British theatre' The Times