ABSTRACT
David Edgar is an award-winning dramatist who is often billed as a political playwright. He has written state-of-the-nation plays such as Destiny (1976), state-of-Europe plays such as Pentecost (1994), and has also written for film, radio and television. He founded the UK’s first MA programme in playwriting, at the University of Birmingham, and has written stage adaptations based on canonical novels and unusual autobiographies, such as Mary Barnes (1979), about a patient of the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing. In the interview Edgar discusses his adaptations: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1982) based on the Charles Dickens novel; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1991), based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel; and Albert Speer (2000), based on Gitta Sereny’s biography of Hitler’s architect. He also refers to several modern and classical dramas, along with Aristotle’s Poetics (2013) and Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1984), reflecting the rich theatrical sensibility and influences that inform his plays and adaptations. The interview took place at David Edgar’s home in Birmingham in 2003.
