The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Author Biography)

Author Biography

David Edgar was born in Birmingham, England, on February 26, 1948. His father, Barrie Edgar, was a television producer, and his mother had been an actress. Birmingham’s proximity to Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon meant that David saw numerous productions of Shakespeare plays as he grew up. He attended Oundle School, a liberal private school north of London, where he acted in and directed plays and discovered his passion for socialist politics. He went on to earn his bachelor of arts in drama from Manchester University, in 1969. Edgar briefly held a position as a journalist while beginning his career as a playwright. During and after college, he wrote and acted in numerous plays, and by 1973 he had produced his first television play, The Eagle Has Landed. As Edgar’s socialist sentiments grew, he helped to found the Theatre Writer’s Union (1975) and produced primarily agitprop plays, simple pieces with a socialist agenda. These plays most often ran in small theaters to little notice, and ultimately Edgar decided, as he explained in an interview with biographer Elizabeth Swain, that he needed the arena of the larger theater with its capacity for spectacle in order to convey complex “political questions which concern the relationship between historical events and the perceptions of the people who are passing through them.” His chance came when his antifascist, antiracist play Destiny moved to the Aldwych Theatre in the fashionable West End theater district of London. Edgar’s political insight was recognized, and he was courted by left-wing newspapers to write political essays.

Edgar soon established a parallel career as a political essayist and speaker, one that he continues to nourish alongside his prolific career as a playwright. Contacts with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company and a commission to produce Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, led to the 1980 production of his most successful work to date, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Before beginning to write his adaptation of the Dickens novel, Edgar met with directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird and a group of forty-five of the main actors over a period of five weeks, reading the Dickens novel together and discussing how to stage the play. The resulting eight-and-a-half-hour production fulfilled Edgar’s goal for theatrical spectacle with a political message. Edgar was especially pleased when a reviewer likened him to Balzac, a French novelist known for epic novels that portrayed nineteenth-century society with all of its problems. Like Balzac, the reviewer said, Edgar “seems to be a secretary for our times.” Edgar responded, “That defined rather more precisely than I’d ever defined before, what I’d like to be. I’d like to be a secretary for the times through which I am living. I’m an unreconstructed social realist, nineteenth-century social realist — or becoming one.” David Edgar currently chairs the masters program in play writing at Birmingham University.