is a playwright
Joined February 2012
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Tonight the fourth preview of my translation of Ibsen's Master Builder, in a striking production at the Arcola by the inestimable Mehmet Ergen and with Greg Hicks, Sally George and Louisa Binder in the leads. We open on Thursday and run till 21 November. arcolatheatre.com/event/the-…
Fifty years ago today, my play about the National Front, Destiny, opened at @TheRSC's Other Place in Stratford and its message remains chillingly topical today. The NF was defeated by mass action in the 70s and the hatred preached by its successors can be defeated today.
Trump White House hosts a video analogising US migrants with Aliens. Novel idea? Not a bit of it. See 1950s McCarthyite witchhuntery and the UK rhetoric of Powell, Thatcher, Hague, Cameron, Badenoch and Farage. see @jonbloomfield2 and me in @BylineTimes bylinesupplement.com/p/the-i…
4/PS: In the locals last month Reform won 50.1% in the Makerfield wards and Labour 26.7% (Reform majority over 9,000). Yesterday Reform down to 34.5%, Labour up to 54.8% and a majority of 9.231. + Tacticals: LDs/Greens won 10.7% and 5,371 last month,1.1% and 471 votes last night.
3/The Lib Dem/Green vote declined from 11% at the General Election to 1.1% yesterday. Unless there has been a huge change of heart by their voters, there was massive tactical voting in a by-election which proved the progressive alliance works.
2/Unlike in the poll, he didn't need Restore to win - he had a 6,120 majority over Reform/Restore combined and gained an absolute majority over all other parties.
1/ Well - a glad confident morning again, at last. And inside the great news, great news:
Burnham added 9 percentage points to Labour's general election tally.
Compared to the Survation poll at the beginning of the campaign he gained 11 percentage points, up from 43% to 54.8%.
Still. Even yesterday. You add up the projected vote-shares of the progressive parties (Green, Lab, LibDems), even without the nats, and they get 51% of the vote, as against 43 for Reform + Conservatives. We are a liberal progressive country. The Right are the minority.
Readings and discussion of my 50 year old @TheRSC antifascist play Destiny at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone at 2.00pm and 6.30pm today. Discussion of relevance today follows. And huge thanks to @BylineTimes Times for producing. thecockpit.org.uk/show/david…
Next Sunday (the 3rd) the Cockpit Theatre is hosting a @BylineTimes event comprising readings and discussion to mark the 50th anniversary of @TheRSC's premiere of my play about the 1970s far right, Destiny. See Kenan Malik's comment in today's Observer observer.co.uk/news/opinion-…
David Edgar retweeted
This year sees the 50th anniversary of David Edgar’s brilliant anti-fascist play Destiny, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976 before transferring to London’s west end. Then it was broadcast as a BBC Play for Today.
It was a play about contemporary British fascism which was, in a very real way, enabled by Searchlight.
The anniversary is being marked by two important events.
Read more here:
searchlightmagazine.com/2026…
@uaf @AntiRacismDay
My piece in @BylineTimes on the 50th anniversary of the @TheRSC 's premiere of my play Destiny, asking what the play got right and wrong about the 70s far right and its lessons. Key scenes to be read; panel discussion; Cockpit Theatre on 3 May. thecockpit.org.uk/show/david…
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The brilliant Nick Kent's multi-four-star-winning production of five short plays marking the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: just one more week to run at the Arcola. arcolatheatre.com/event/ukra…
David Edgar retweeted
Playwrights @DavidBEdgar , Sonali Bhattacharyya and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm have urged artistic directors to take greater risks on original writing following Indhu Rubasingham’s Jennie Lee Lecture 👇 thestage.co.uk/news/playwrig…
2026 marks the 500th anniversary of the Tyndale New Testament, the first English Biblical translation to be printed. With Shakespeare, the greatest single influence on our English. Memories of Greg Doran's great production of my play about the English Bible @TheRSC 12 years ago.
Statistics show that the average time that the average person needs to wrap presents is 87 minutes. By a staggering coincidence, that is exactly the length of my play The New Real, available for another nine days only right here. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002myr…
Last month the wonderful director Lily Susan Todd died at 83. The companies she worked for ranged from the pioneering Monstrous Regiment to the endearing National Theatre of Brent. My obituary is in the print Guardian today as well as still online. theguardian.com/stage/2025/d…
The lovely and brilliant director, actor and writer Lily Susan Todd (co-founder of Monstrous Regiment) died last week. We wrote a play together for the Monsters in the (theatrically) glorious 70s and I was honoured to write her obituary for the Guardian. theguardian.com/stage/2025/d…
My obituary of the great Tom Stoppard, on the Writers' Guild website. writersguild.org.uk/obituary…
