Birmingham-based David Edgar is one of the UK’s greatest living playwrights, not to mention one of the most prolific. He tells What’s On about his latest work, The New Real, which premieres in Royal Shakespeare Company venue The Other Place next month...

It’s safe to say that theatrical greasepaint courses through the veins of Birmingham-based playwright David Edgar. His parents met at the Birmingham Rep, he’s been writing plays professionally since 1971 - more than 60 in total - and has had more work premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) than any other playwright. These include Destiny (1976), Maydays (1983), Pentecost (1994), The Prisoner’s Dilemma (2001) and Written On The Heart (2011), as well as his memorable adaptation of A Christmas Carol, performed in 2017, 2018 and 2022.

The near 50-year relationship with the RSC came about through luck rather than judgement, he says. Destiny, his play about the rise of the National Front, had been commissioned but then rejected by the Birmingham Rep and only ended up in Stratford-upon-Avon after David spent quite a bit of time “hawking it around”.

“It only ended up at the RSC because a director at The Other Place persuaded Trevor Nunn, then the RSC’s artistic director, to read it,” recalls the 76-year-old, who says Nunn’s decision to stage it - and then move it to a larger theatre in London - effectively kick-started his career. 

David shows no signs of slowing up, with two new plays currently in production. Here In America premieres in London this month; The New Real brings him back to Stratford two weeks later. He’ll be commuting between rehearsals - mercifully both in London - but is more excited than daunted by the hectic schedule.

“It’s going to be mad for a while, so I’m trying to pace myself. I’m thrilled to have now done so much work for the RSC. I’ve always lived in Birmingham, and it’s one of what I regard as my home theatres.”

The New Real brings things full circle in more ways than one. Like his RSC debut, it will premiere in The Other Place (recently refurbished and celebrating its 50th anniversary this year), although the parallels between David’s first RSC production, his latest one, and the recent race-fuelled riots in the UK are rather less encouraging.

“‘Unleashing Demons’ could easily be the title of the play. It’s absolutely about the dangers of mainstream politicians coming up with theories and false facts that then play themselves out on the streets. So it does go back to Destiny, and also Maydays, which was about people moving from left to right politically, and which the RSC revived in 2018.

“2024 sees probably the biggest-ever battle between mainstream politics and populist insurgents, around the world. I’m delighted the RSC are presenting my new play about the origins of this titanic struggle, in the most tumultuous of times.

“I hope it’s not my last play for the Company, but it certainly does continue, or echo, some of the themes of my earlier work.” 

David says The New Real is ostensibly a political thriller, but with plenty of humour along the way, largely of the ‘fish-out-of-water’ variety, as the main protagonists, two American political strategists, pitch up on opposite sides of an election in an unnamed former Eastern Bloc country in the early 2000s.

The former investigative journalist came up with the idea after reading a book about how American political consultants were spreading their practice throughout the world, and particularly in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

“Lots of people wanted to advise the Eastern Europeans how to do liberal democracy. There was a particular election in Ukraine in 2010 in which there were American political consultants on both sides of the presidential election. I thought that was fascinating in a way that so many stories - fundamentally Westerns - are, where you’ve got the white hat and the black hat coming into town, into a place they don’t know or understand, in order to rescue it from the villains surrounding it.”

Far from going in to teach, Edgar says the strategists ended up learning how the Eastern Europeans were doing elections, as well as how they were being influenced by the worst of Western electoral practices. 
“It seemed a fascinating way of looking at what’s happened to world politics this century, and most obviously the rise of national populism and what we’ve seen with Brexit, Donald Trump, and now with Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. It’s a whole new form of politics that is very polarising - people who you imagine would traditionally have voted for social democratic parties are increasingly voting for right wing populist parties.

“It seemed interesting to combine those two ideas. It’s two political consultants who have run a company together in America, split up rather acrimoniously, and they end up on opposite sides of the same election in a faraway country. So it’s a kind of grudge match thousands of miles away from home.

There’s comedy in it, but also it’s a way of looking at how the new politics has been constructed, and how it’s spread throughout the world.”

Conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’ are also key themes of the play - hence its title - but they go beyond the simplistic claims of Donald Trump.

“Fake news rumbles underneath the play, and there’s also some quite interesting East European varieties of fake news in politics. Political parties that aren’t really political parties, and various ways of manipulation which the West might see as being in its infancy.”

David’s “big and complicated political play” is rather more sophisticated than that, and includes an array of video and technological wizardry that may or may not be visible to all of the audience. It’s a deliberate ploy, as the play, which is being directed by Holly Race Roughan, will be performed in traverse; the stage will effectively be a corridor in the middle of the auditorium, with the audience on both sides.

“Holly’s very keen on the idea that it’ll be a bit like Parliament, very polarised, and literally split down the middle. There are some quite interesting possibilities about what one side sees but the other side doesn’t, or sees in a different way. I think it’s a very exciting metaphor for a play about how society has become polarised.”

The New Real shows at the RSC’s The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Thursday 3 October to Saturday 2 November