Almost all humans on this planet have organized themselves, or been forcibly organized into, polities of one type or another. Each one of these is different from the others in its origins, history, forms of association, power sharing, protections provided and obligations imposed. Citizenship practices, and other markers, distinguish members of a particular polity from guests, aliens and/or enemies, who are all ‘outside’ the polity in one way or another. Inevitably, a playwright who investigates politics in his writing must deal in a number of ways with how polities are composed, how membership is arranged, and what happens when these arrangements go awry or break down altogether.

David Edgar is a skilled adapter, and is perhaps best admired for that talent. Nicholas Nickleby, his biggest ‘hit’, is probably also his best-known adaptation, but the plays we discuss in this chapter are also adaptations, and he has adapted or translated a number of classical dramas as well, such as recent versions of Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Brecht’s Galileo. In 2010 his highly successful adaption of Arthur & George, the prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes, was co-produced by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse.

In fact the subject of adaptation is a bit of a sore point with Edgar, who feels the dismissal of the artistry of adaptation by certain scholars and critics (for example, Michael Billington) is unfair and unreasonable. David Hare has also taken the critical establishment to task for finding the Tricycle’s tribunal play about the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, The Colour of Justice, created by Richard Norton-Taylor, not suitable for the Best Play Award of 1999, because they would not see editing as creative writing. The focus of our chapter on Edgar’s adaptations takes for granted that these are legitimate new plays in their own right, but we also seek to understand ‘the relationship between the original work and my [Edgar’s] perception of it’. We are also interested in the matters of aesthetic craft that shape the dramaturgy, and finally of course are committed to the political inquiry of the entire volume – what do the human exemplars here portrayed communicate via Edgar about themselves as political animals and intersubjective beings embedded in particular socii?

If David Edgar saw his public persona as a (Balzacian) secretary for his times in 1996, he is in an even stronger position to perform that role now, as he moves into the fifth decade of his prolific career. There are secretaries and there are Secretaries: Mikhail Gorbachev was a Secretary. And there are Secretaries-General – roles with a good deal more room for leadership and ability to shape affairs than those who merely record. We have shown that Edgar is a Secretary at least as much as a secretary, and that, with some of his fellow playwrights who also ‘attend to arrangements’, he is engaged in defining the cultural character of the new millennium.

The collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ in 1989 caught many political commentators by surprise because it happened so quickly and decisively. Within a year, however, David Edgar had joined fellow playwrights Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, and Tariq Ali in exploring the consequences and changing circumstances of those events. Beginning with The Shape of the Table (1990), his closest look at practical negotiation and the transfer of power in a formal political setting, Edgar wrote three plays over the next decade which form a trilogy following the unfolding drama of post-Communist politics. The other two plays, Pentecost and The Prisoner’s Dilemma, were written five and ten years on, respectively, when the politics of immigration and refugees generated deeply divisive fault lines for all of Europe. The former Eastern bloc countries faced extremely difficult problems establishing workable democracies because they were troubled by ultra-nationalism, ethnic conflict, racism, financial instability, and a lack of effective leadership – not to mention external pressures and ‘assistance’ that were often internally perceived as meddling and arrogance on the part of the West. These three plays are Edgar’s most detailed treatment of the problem of democracy itself, and it is no coincidence that in their moment they addressed issues that the West, no less than the former East, was finding increasingly intractable.

There are at least two ways to view Edgar’s preoccupation with this material: first, as a writer and activist on the Left, the end of the cold war and the collapse of the USSR and its eastern and central European (ECE) satellites meant a serious confrontation with the question of what was ‘left of the Left’ in terms of ideology if not programme, historical lessons if not future objectives. Almost overnight ‘socialism’ became identified in the West as a failed project, and conservative scholars and commentators were quick to begin the rhetoric, now only too familiar, of a ‘new world order’ in which capitalism was the triumphant global system and socialism was relegated to the dustbin of history. Probably Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) is the key touchstone text for the popular conviction that western liberal democracy/capitalism would be universalized as the final form of human government/economy. Thus obviously for a committed writer on the Left, like Edgar, it was important to examine the changes that were underway in order to understand what was happening and also to begin a debate about what price the new democracies would pay for their fledgling arrangements, and what liabilities their communist histories and their years of satellite politics would have for attempts to reconfigure their polities.

In his role as a public intellectual, David Edgar combines a robust and unique blend of technical skills, creative talent, comprehensive understanding, passionate conviction, linguistic wit, and a capacity for sheer hard work. He grew up in a theatre family, his father an actor and stage manager at Birmingham Rep and then a television producer for the BBC. His mother was an actor and radio announcer, and his aunt Nancy Burman was a theatre administrator, running Birmingham Rep in the 1960s and 1970s. In such a family, Edgar learned early the nature and value of performance and the need to be performative – as well as some of the costs of doing so.

Edgar attended Oundle public school near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, and then read English Literature at the University of Manchester, reinforcing and developing a lifelong enjoyment of words, rhetoric, wit, and language. He was editor of the college newspaper and developed his political commitments protesting against the Vietnam war and university exam policies. His first employment was as a reporter on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. (Good) journalism entails reporting on, and intervening in, public events and discourse, emphasizes fact-based evidence behind positions, and retrieves significant disclosures from seemingly commonplace phenomena – all valuable skills for a lifetime of writing and activism.

Throughout all of David Edgar’s work, there runs a red thread of political commitment to democratic socialism. He does not advance it so much as he assumes it: social justice, emancipatory movements, class analysis, critique of capitalism – all of these values and practices underpin his creative writing as well as his non-theatrical works. This list of qualities is, however, carefully chosen – our readers will notice we list class analysis, not class struggle; critique of capitalism, not Marxism-Leninism; emancipatory movements, not revolution; and social justice, not collective ownership of the means of production. In short, we are looking at a fairly capacious definition of socialism that can be attributed to Edgar throughout his career, to cover a powerful continuity of outlook. Of course, at various moments along the way the particular political vision he has held and the particular allegiances or practices that seemed efficacious were more radical, perhaps, but as his politics has evolved, these values fundamentally remain.

Of the distinctive voices in the contemporary British theatre, David Edgar’s provides the most comprehensive articulation of major political questions. His career spans more than four eventful and politically complex decades, and encompasses every variety of writing for performance, including agitprop and touring pieces; community plays; radio, film and television plays; and large-scale plays produced in major national venues such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. In addition, Edgar has maintained a high profile as a public intellectual, engaging in depth with a wide variety of political issues through newspaper opinion pages, journal essays, and book reviews, as well as via frequent public speaking engagements before a variety of organizations, including the Commission on Racial Equality; the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce; the Fabian Society; and the annual Marxism conference. Thus, well beyond his own creative work, Edgar has been a central figure in British public life, particularly with regard to the relationships among the arts, government, and society.