#david edgar

[bodhrancomedy]

So, for anyone who doesn’t know, David Edgar is one of the UK’s most produced living playwrights. This guy’s a big deal and he’s pretty cool.

My last theatre job was making a companion piece to his latest play The New Real (2024) for the Royal Shakespeare Company - as part of this half-training programme, half-test run - we got to have a Q&A with him and the producer and director.

At the very end, one of my coworkers asked David, “How do you overcome writer’s block?”

And this 76 year old man who had just had TikTok and who exactly we were and what we were doing with/to his play explained to him, looked us all in the eye and very simply told us, “I don’t know what that is. Just get good.”

10/10 no notes, funniest piece of advice I’ve ever gotten from a living legend.

[hayleylovesjessica]

In today's mail: Here in America by David Edgar, about the beef between Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. I've loved Edgar since seeing The Prisoner's Dilemma with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon during my first summer in the UK. He is, without question, the most underrated and underappreciated playwright in Great Britain. (BTW, he's won the Tony, the Olivier, and the Evening Standard awards for best new play, and I still think he's tremendously underrated and underappreciated because he's just that good!) Fortunately for me, the main theater company in Raleigh, Burning Coal, has had a wonderful working relationship with Edgar that goes back decades, even mounting the American premiere of several of his plays, including this one, which my partner and I are seeing Saturday evening.

[too-antigonish]

Here In America: First Impressions...

Just finished my first watch of Here In America and loved it...

All four actors were superb. The minimalist production worked for me: staging, music, lighting, etc. was just enough. The writing was engaging—I never found myself bored or checking the clock. American accents not 100% perfect, but never off in a way that was grating.  

I was worried during the first appearance of "Miss Bauer" that the way she was used might be a bit intrusive in terms of pulling you out of the rest of the narrative,  but after that first scene it totally worked for me.

The narrative itself intentionally swings your sympathies back and forth between Kazan and Miller (and to some degree Molly and Miss Bauer/Monroe) in some very skillful ways and covers a lot of intellectual and philosophical territory in the process. Regardless of where your sympathies lie, you will come away with a greater understanding of why the particular people involved did what they did and said what they said. 

There are some killer lines in the last two minutes that really sum up what the play is about. Ideas don't exist in a neat and tidy vacuum. They exist in real people who've live actual, complicated lives and are deeply affected by their experiences and feelings.

[worstjourney]

Shakespeare, comedy, tragedy, love, and death

You ever have one of those things you remember but just can't place? I knew that someone clever once said that Shakespeare's comedies teach you how to love, and his tragedies teach you how to die. I quoted it, such as I could, in an article I wrote about the Polar Party. No amount of searching turned up any substantial clue to the source of it, though, aside from some Cambridge priest including it in a sermon with as vague a recollection as I had, aside from the hint that it might have come from David Edgar.

I am pleased to announce that I now know exactly where it's from, thanks to having a hankering for half-remembered documentaries. It is in fact David Edgar, speaking to Simon Schama, towards the end of the second of his two-part study on Shakespeare which aired in 2012. [link leads to iPlayer where this show is miraculously still available.]

GOTCHA.

[teenagedirtstache]

[surroundingw]

FROM :  mikeepoo  -  A humpback WHALE near the coast of Tongatapu, Tonga - by David Edgar

[bitch-dont-krill-my-vibe]

Colossal

Juvenile humpback whale several miles off the coast of Tongatapu, Tonga.

“This playful whale came right up to me and looked directly into my eyes as the tip of his rostrum glistened in the afternoon sun.” - David Edgar

Photo belongs to David Edgar And was entered into National Geographic’s 2019 Travel Photo Contest

[ghoti-and-us]

David Edgar