#david edgar

☔️🍋 Louis coming onstage and singing Lemonade, HDWGHWT Pittsburgh, 10 July 2026.

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.”

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. 

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.]

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