David Edgar (playwright)

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. He was resident playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974–75 and has been a board member there since 1985. 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, 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.

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. He is also the author of The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (1988) and editor of The State of Play (2000), a book by playwrights on the art of writing plays. He had his first operatic libretto, The Bridge, performed as part of the Covent Garden Festival in 1998. He is a former president of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, elected in 1985.

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. 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.

Edgar was born in Birmingham, England, into the fourth generation of a theatrical family. His maternal grandmother was the character actress Isabel Thornton, who had made films in the 1930s, including Laugh with Me (1938); his maternal aunt Nancy Burman ran the Birmingham Repertory Theatre throughout the 1960s and '70s, and his mother Joan (née Burman) was an actress and BBC Overseas Service radio announcer during World War II. His father, Barrie Edgar (1919–2012), was an actor and stage manager at the Birmingham Rep, before joining the BBC in 1946, soon working as a television producer, whose credits included Come Dancing and Songs of Praise. Barrie Edgar's father, and David Edgar's grandfather, was the early broadcaster Percy Edgar who had been the founding manager of 5IT – the first BBC radio station to open outside London – and the first regional Director of the BBC Midland Region.

Being brought up in what he later recalled as a "more or less upper-middle-class family", with both parents, three grandparents, and "various other slightly more distant relatives" all involved in the theatre or broadcasting, Edgar remembers having seen most of the Shakespeare canon by the age of fifteen, either in his native Birmingham or in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon, plus the complete Agatha Christie and many more of "the sort of plays one would never go to now." His father converted a garden shed into a twelve-seat theatre for him in their garden and the young Edgar began to write plays for "the theatre in the shed" from the age of five with the intention of giving himself the starring role. By the age of nine he had written his first full-scale work, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare. "At this stage," Edgar recalled, "the idea of being a playwright who would write large parts for other people had not entered my consciousness." He really wanted to be an actor: "I wrote the 'Life and Times' for the sole purpose of playing Shakespeare's lead actor Richard Burbage." However, after some tactful advice from his mother regarding his acting ability, he decided that acting was not for him and turned his hand to writing more seriously.

At Oundle School in Northamptonshire, Edgar became immersed in theatre and was the first pupil in over 300 years of school history to be permitted to direct a play. Undeterred by his actors all being male, he chose Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, a play calling for six female roles and, forgetting his mother's advice, cast himself in the lead role as the woman who hopes to profit from war by running a canteen for soldiers, but loses all three of her children to the war from which she had hoped to profit. After leaving school in 1966, Edgar taught for one term at a preparatory school and then went to Manchester University to read drama with a view to becoming a playwright.

In addition to chairing the Socialist Society at Manchester University, Edgar edited the student newspaper, and found himself unable to heed his mother's advice. In 1967, the National Student Drama Festival was held in Bradford and was won by Edinburgh University's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965). Peter Farago, director of the winning play, put together a cast from talent at the Festival to perform Mike Alfreds' Mandrake, The Musical at the next Edinburgh Festival. That cast included Ian Charleson and David Rintoul, both of Edinburgh University, Tim Pigott-Smith from Bristol University and David Edgar played the Apothecary. On graduating in 1969, Edgar became a journalist with the Telegraph & Argus in Bradford, before becoming a full-time writer in 1972. He maintains his journalism with regular contributions to newspapers and journals such as The Guardian and The London Review of Books.