David Edgar
Title: ‘State of Play’
Venue: Little Hall, Sidgwick Site, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA
All welcome.
David Edgar will outline the story of new playwriting in postwar Britain and the growth of a distinct anti-writer movement in universities and the theatre industry since the 1990s. He will set this against the reality of play production and publication in the contemporary British theatre.
David Edgar's original plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company include Destiny, Maydays (revived in 2018) and Pentecost, the second in a series of plays about Eastern Europe after the Cold War, following The Shape of the Table for the National Theatre and preceding The Prisoner's Dilemma for the RSC. His adaptations for the RSC include Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol (2017, 2018). In 2018 he wrote and presented a solo show, Trying it On, which toured to the Warwick Arts Centre, the RSC's Other Place at Stratford, and the Royal Court. In 1989, he founded Britain's first graduate playwriting course, at the University of Birmingham. His book about playwriting, How Plays Work, was published by Nick Hern Books in 2009. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1995, and Humanitas visiting Professor of Drama at Oxford in 2014-15. He writes regularly for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.
Enquiries to: Dr Drew Milne
