Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-kc5xb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-15T06:35:45.095Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Socialism’s aftermath

The Shape of the Table, Pentecost, and The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2011

Janelle Reinelt
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Gerald Hewitt
Affiliation:
University of the Pacific, California
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Political Theatre of David Edgar
Negotiation and Retrieval
, pp. 205 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×