David Edgar (playwright)

David Edgar
FRSL
Born (1948-02-26) 26 February 1948 (age 76)
Birmingham, England
OccupationPlaywright
Parent(s)Joan (née Burman) and Barrie Edgar
RelativesPercy Edgar (grandfather)

David Edgar FRSL (born 26 February 1948) is a British playwright and writer who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain.[1] He was resident playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974–75 and has been a board member there since 1985.[2] Awarded a Fellowship in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic, he was made a Bicentennial Arts Fellow (US) (1978–79).

Edgar has enjoyed a long-term association with the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1976,[3] beginning with his play Destiny; he was the company's literary consultant from 1984 to 1988, and became an honorary associate artist of the company in 1989. His plays have been directed by former artistic directors of both of the largest British subsidised companies, Trevor Nunn for the RSC and Peter Hall for the National Theatre.[3]

His works have been performed in Ireland, throughout western and eastern Europe, the U.S., and as far afield as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan.[3] He is also the author of The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (1988)[4] and editor of The State of Play (2000), a book by playwrights on the art of writing plays.[2] He had his first operatic libretto, The Bridge, performed as part of the Covent Garden Festival in 1998.[3] He is a former president of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain,[5] and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, elected in 1985.[2][6]

He founded the University of Birmingham's MA in Playwriting Studies programme in 1989 and was its director until 1999. He was appointed Professor of Playwriting Studies in 1995.[2] How Plays Work (Nick Hern Books, 2010), an influential study of dramatic structure illustrated by examples of both classic and contemporary plays, grew out of the Playwriting course he taught at Birmingham.

  1. ^ "David Edgar Biography", Dictionary of Literary Biography, excerpt at Bookrags.com
  2. ^ a b c d "The British Council". Contemporarywriters.com. Archived from the original on 1 October 2007. Retrieved 3 March 2009.
  3. ^ a b c d doollee.com Archived 24 December 2017 at the Wayback Machine – the playwrights database
  4. ^ The title is a quotation from Karl Marx and comes from the opening sentences of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), which read: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
  5. ^ "Who's who". The Writers' Guild. Archived from the original on 29 December 2008. Retrieved 3 March 2009.
  6. ^ "David Edgar", Fellows, Royal Society of Literature.