In the summer of 1968, David Edgar came to Edinburgh as a twenty-year-old undergraduate to perform in a student production of The Mandrake, the only play by Italian renaissance philosopher and poet Niccolo Machiavelli, and here rewritten as a musical. Edgar played the Apothecary. Fifty-one years on, the veteran writer of epic state of the nation plays including Destiny and Maydays makes a belated return to the Edinburgh stage in his already successful solo piece, Trying it On. In the play, the now seventy-one year-old Edgar is confronted by his younger and arguably more radical self, who arrived in Edinburgh fired up by the seismic events of 1968. The student uprisings in Paris, London and elsewhere, the Prague Spring, anti-Vietnam protests and the assassination of civil rights giant Martin Luther King had all left their mark. For a young man just starting out in the world, it was a lot to take in. It also proved to be an inspiration for everything that followed. “There wasn’t
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.