David Edgar

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a playwright. He's been writing plays since the age of five, ever since his father built a twelve seater theatre in the garden shed.

Presenter0:39

Unashamedly political, he's championed the left-wing cause from the moment he started working with Agit Prop Theatre in Bradford in the early 70s. He came to national attention with Destiny, a play about the National Front, written in 1976. Despite his popular success with Nicholas Nickleby, written for the RSC, he's preferred to plough a political furrow in the main, most notably with That Summer about the Miners' Strike and a trilogy about the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. His Marxist beliefs may have taken a bit of a pummelling over the last 16 years or so, and his political dreams become somewhat unfashionable, but he remains self-assured and confident. It continues to be important, he says, to look at a mysterious and dangerous world and try to make sense of it. He is David Edgar. You came to fame, as I've indicated, David, as a playwright who advocated left-wing change, but that was easier in the days of the miners' strike and the three-day week and so on. Politics is much less divisive these days. It's much more difficult to write political theatre, really, isn't it?

David Edgar1:42

I I think it it it was. I think politics came back with the vengeance with nine eleven really, when when people suddenly reali were reminded that politics could kill. I think that for twenty years you know the remit of politics had reduced. But I think generally you're right. I think the last thirty years have have seen a d decline in the power of the public realm in general.

Presenter2:04

Well, it's a decline in the extremes of politics, isn't it? I mean, everybody's crowding onto the middle ground and people like therefore level

David Edgar2:09

I think that's all left.

Presenter2:10

But with not a lot to write.

David Edgar2:11

Well, I I think the the fear at the moment is that there is so many people in the middle ground that certainly with the British National Party's recent successes, I think certain spaces are being left open perhaps on both sides.

Presenter2:11

The

Presenter2:23

The point really to put to you is that that you've always written as a kind of means to an end, haven't you? You you know, you've had something to say, and as we're observing here, it's more or less gone away except for the big global issue.

Presenter2:35

Has that left you feeling, you know, where do I go next?

David Edgar2:38

No, because I think I think the b the big theme of what I've always written is is about uh the gap between ideals and reality, and I think that that will never go away.

Presenter2:47

And you chose the theatre as the means to this end, which is not surprising because you have a a big theatrical background, but not a particularly political background at all. In fact, I suspect I'm right in saying your parents voted Conservative.

David Edgar3:01

Well my my father was always very conservative. My mother who who died just before Christmas w was more eccentric and eclectic in her political views, not always entirely consistent. But no, you're right. I mean my parents met on the stage door steps of the Birmingham Repetitive Theatre in the late thirties when when my father was an actor, stage manager and my mother was an acting student and my mother went on to be a radio announcer at Gabriel.

Presenter3:23

It was a well-known voice during the war.

David Edgar3:24

She was. She was one of the first. She was the Angela Ripon of her day. Jane Berman. Jane Berman, that's right. And then my dad left the theatre after the war and was one of the first television producers at Alexandra Palace. My formative experience was the late 1960s and the fact I was 20 in 1968, which was, you know, to misquote Wordsworth's bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and in full-time higher education was very heaven. I mean, that was the thing that gave me a mission, and I don't think I would be a playwright without that.

Presenter3:27

Joan Berman.

Presenter3:54

I want to explore that with you, but let's let's pause for your first record. What is it?

David Edgar3:57

Well the first record is from Nicholas Nickleby, and it's I think Stephen Oliver's Incidental Music for Nicolas Nickleby is by a writer who's written the best incidental music for theatre since Mendelssohn. And I think it's just a wonderfully sustaining piece.

Speaker 44:18

And so the grave of me and so on.

Presenter4:42

The Journey to Portsmouth, composed by Stephen Oliver for My Castaway's production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and that was sung by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company with the John McCarthy singers. That was your big commercial hit in 1980. I think you got four Oliviers, four Tonys, an Emmy when uh on the television.

David Edgar5:00

On the television.

Presenter5:03

But you were when you were asked to do it by Trevor Nunn, you hadn't read the book. Is that right? And you fibbed.

David Edgar5:08

Then that would be

David Edgar5:09

Well, I kind of he rang up and explained why the RSC wanted and I was in America at the time, so dramatic transatlantic call. And then he said, oh, it's down to Nicholas Nickleby or our mutual friend. Think about it and I'll call you back. And I then rang my wife Eve, who was in England, and this was before when transatlantic phone conversations were a big deal, and said, is Nicholas Nickleby the one with Mrs. Gamp in it? And it isn't. And she explained patiently the two novels and said, I should do it if it's our mutual friend and don't do it if it's Nickleby because it's got various problems and he wrote it when he was 26 and so on. And then Trevor ran back and before I could start on my pitch, he said, by the way, we've decided it's Nicholas Nickleby. And so I read it, I read half of it, it's very long, on the plane on the way home and in this particular case decided not to follow Eve's advice. And I entered a rehearsal room with 40 actors and two directors and a stage management team to start working on it, more unprepared for any project than I had ever been before or ever intend to be again, absolutely. But it did work out and in fact it's for the first time being revived professionally at Tritister this year and the old deer seems to stand up.

Speaker 46:11

Forever

Speaker 26:13

Pimp

Presenter6:22

And it is huge because it grew like Topsy, didn't it?

David Edgar6:26

It did. We originally thought of it as one, you know, one Shakespeare-length show, and it was very quickly, very quickly apparent that that was not going to work. And so we thought, well, we'll do it in two parts, like Henry IV, part one and two. And then that'll be fine, and we'll have two sort of sensibly length things. And then the first preview of part two.

David Edgar6:46

The second interval started after the bar shut. I think the show came down half past midnight. It is much shorter now, I have to say.

Presenter6:55

Huge cast, more than fifty.

David Edgar6:56

No, we start it's it's sort of early forties and then and then, you know, you can do it with less and and and the new version I've done for Trichester is is is twenty three, which is still substantial, but it's

Presenter7:07

You like big cards. I mean, you don't like little four handers, do you?

David Edgar7:08

I love a little.

David Edgar7:10

No, I think I think theatre you know, you just see, you know, twenty people on a stage moving about and and it's just such an exciting thing to look at.

Presenter7:19

In fact, I've got a quote from you here. Can you confirm this one? I'm a snooker player. I like striking one ball and hitting another six. Is that what it's a word?

David Edgar7:25

That's absolutely right, as opposed to billiards, which is, you know, w in which it's all the co you know, the combinations of three balls and then you shut up shot. But no, I'm absolutely a snooker player.

Presenter7:36

Record number two.

David Edgar7:37

I think if you uh if you passed into adulthood anywhere between Love Me Do and Let It Be, it would be perverse not to choose a Beatles track. And I've chosen what I think is the first uh Beatles single after they started getting number ones not to be number one, which is Strawberry Fields Forever.

Speaker 47:54

Let me take you down, cause I'm going to strawberry field.

Speaker 48:05

Nothing is real.

Speaker 48:08

Nothing to get hung up on

Presenter8:12

Uh

Speaker 48:12

Strawberry fruit

Presenter8:14

Beals.

Speaker 48:14

Uh

Presenter8:14

Forever

Speaker 48:15

Uh

Presenter8:17

Strawberry Fields forever. The Beetles are memories of a childhood near Birmingham, where you were brought up on I gather on a kind of leafy suburban estate. Hardly the breeding ground for a radical.

David Edgar8:25

Uh

David Edgar8:26

No, no, absolutely. And and ni neither neither of them, you know, neither a childhood of deprivation nor an unhappy childhood. So I don't end up being a playwright being well equipped at all.

Presenter8:37

But a playwright you were beg uh or you were encouraged to be from the very beginning because of this theatre in the garden shed. Just just describe it to me.

David Edgar8:44

My father built a theatre in a garden shed and I did performances into which I corralled my small friends and it was during a period when I wanted to be an actor and was really writing like Nell Coward parts for myself to play. A little later on I played at the age of thirteen at my all boys' school, Miss Prism and The Importance of Being Ernest and the family myth is that my mother said afterwards, Well, it's not going to be acting, is it dear?

Presenter9:09

But the theatre itself, it was a a fully fledged theatre. It had a proper lighting system and tabs and

David Edgar9:12

No, it was a lighting system and it had an audience of twelve and it was a a fully functioning thing.

Presenter9:18

And were you taken to the theatre proper?

David Edgar9:20

Massively. And indeed, the first time I went at the age of three and three quarters to see Beauty and the Beast, at the first entrance of The Beast, I apparently screamed the place down, was taken out, and because my aunt was administer of the theatre, I was taken backstage to meet the now maskless Beast in his dressing room and to shake his hand and thus be reassured and then escorted back into the auditorium. And of course on his next entrance I screamed the place down again. The joke is that that was the last genuine theatrical experience of my life because from then on I kind of realised that it was fantasy and illusion and that's what I wanted to help making.

David Edgar9:58

Number three. At my boys' public school, one of the features was that they did oratorios and there was a cycle of them. And if you stayed for five years, which I did, you would get the same one at the end of the beginning. And I sung, in fact, the B minor Mass twice. The second time as a bass, but the first time as an alto. And the alto section is always a very small part of the choir in a boys' school because, for reasons of self-esteem, you want to get down to the tenors as quickly as you can. And Bach realised this, and he doesn't give the altos very much on their own. And they don't start anything except for the gloria. And they're rescued pretty quickly. But this is, as it were, the altos moment of glo or awe.

Speaker 411:18

It sends us feeling

Presenter11:36

That was the opening of The Gloria from Bach's Mass in B minor, sung by the Leipzig Radio Choir, led by Goert Frischmut with the Dresden State Orchestra conducted by Peter Schreier. David Edgar, you were obviously big on the school drama scene, and you were, I think, the first boy at your public school, Andel, to be invited to direct a school production. No, but never been, never happened in the history of the school.

David Edgar12:00

Well, in fact, I set up a drama club in order to do that. So I set up a sort of drama club in fr friendly rivalry with the scho school play, again for for reasons of aggrandisement, of control freakery, in order to direct. At that point I wanted to be a director.

Presenter12:15

But it comes as some surprise, therefore, against that background, to um to hear that you were put into something you called the thicks sixth.

David Edgar12:23

I sort of had various problems in my O-level year, so I got rather bad O-levels and the school then tracked you towards a certain set of A-levels, which was called general remove and general sixth. And the A-levels were, this was for people who were deemed not to be very bright, economics, geography, and English. Now what does that tell you about the English class system and what's wrong with the British establishment? Economics is what you do if you're stupid. However, I didn't want to do economics, I wanted to do history. And so I in that first year I managed to persuade the school that I should be transferred back onto the track I wanted to be.

Presenter12:58

But you won't take.

David Edgar12:59

Well, indeed.

Presenter13:00

But they didn't make you a prefect either, did they?

David Edgar13:02

No, I think the first two years at Andel were pretty horrible and among the worst years of my life, and the second two years were pretty good.

Presenter13:09

Bullying, are we talking?

David Edgar13:09

Well, I, you know, I didn't like being away from home and, you know, I wasn't I wasn't very sporty.

Presenter13:16

But would you have been seen as a a dissident figure or a dissident figure in the making? Were you already rebelling?

David Edgar13:22

Well, I I mean certainly I began wearing a campaign for nuclear disarmament badge and being involved in that campaign, which is the big thing that was going on at the time.

Presenter13:33

You'd have been, what, about 14 or 15 during the Cuban missile crisis, wouldn't you? Yeah, so that was a big.

David Edgar13:35

Cool.

David Edgar13:37

Yes, and that was a big you know that that did feel as if you know that was a conspiracy by the world leaders to prevent me getting to my 15th birthday. No, I felt that very strongly and I remember that very clearly as something passing by as it happens. My school was quite near an Air Force base, so we also felt that we were kind of going to be underneath whatever happened. Next piece of music. Well, the next piece of music is actually speech, and I'd want a piece of speech, and I picked the Martin Luther King I Have a Dream speech because A, it's a wonderful piece of rhetoric. I think it's the best speech of the 20th century, but also it's about the civil rights movement to desegregate the South, which I think is a model political movement which brought together lots of people from very disparate backgrounds in a common cause and up against very considerable odds. And it succeeded. I mean his dream was, you know, his dream was made reality. I'm actually playing the very end of it, which is when having gone through the states of the South, he then goes back to the South at the very end and then builds up to an extraordinary climax.

Speaker 214:39

For rights reasons, we are unable to bring you this choice.

Presenter14:43

Part of Martin Luther King's address to civil rights marchers in Washington in 1963. By the time you got to university, David, you went to Manchester to read drama, a revolutionary atmosphere had been sweeping the student scene. We'd had Lesse-Venements in Paris, and there'd been student sit-ins and stuff. It was something, it seems to me, that really appealed to you, wasn't it? You just.

David Edgar15:04

Yes, and it was very difficult not to be caught up in it at the time. You know, people now look back on the 60s and see it as being alternatively trivial and grandiose. But I do think that when we look back, say, from 2020 and say what were the significant things that happened in the last hundred years, I think among them will be the political movements that started there.

Presenter15:27

It's still difficult quite to identify why you should have taken to it with with the strength that you did. And you know, you put your radical roots down at that time and they've only grown stronger ever since. A lot of people flirted with it, but, you know, not all remained, in fact, far from all remained. Why you, from this leafy Edgburston, Conservative background?

David Edgar15:47

Well, who knows? I do think being at a perfect school does give you certain resentments and so on against authority which hold you in good stead in years to come. But I've always been a bit unhappy with that. And I wrote a play about people who defect from left to right in later life called Maydays. And it was partly as a sort of self-exploration. And the central character was partly based on speculation as to how would I move from left to right. And I wrote that in order to try and avoid doing it, really.

Presenter16:17

But your parents must have found they must have been puzzled by you. They must have found your early agitprop uh drama a bit worrying, surely.

David Edgar16:25

Well, yes. I mean, my mother was always very assiduous. My father one or two plays, not I think because of their politics, but because of of sexual content very early on, which my father, you know, read and decided were not for him. But actually, he's been a great supporter of my work for for the vast length of my mother used to stump off down to London and go to strange, you know, underground theatres off the Tottenham Court Road and see plays with nudity and violence and left-wing politics and so on, and come back and comment on the lunch. And but with great assidiousness. So I think they've been terrifically supportive under under often difficult circumstances.

Presenter16:59

You you didn't, of course, become a playwright straightaway. You went into journalism first with the the the Bradford Telegraph and Ogs. We've got this Northern thing going on. You go from Birmingham to Manchester and then across to Bradford.

David Edgar17:02

Yeah.

Presenter17:09

That seems to have been important.

David Edgar17:11

Oh, it was one of the great things that happened to me was I didn't get into Bristol because Bristol demanded a modern languages A level if you read drama, because I wanted to read drama, which is why I didn't apply to Oxford or Cambridge. Who knows whether I would have got in. And so I went to my second choice, which was Manchester, and that was a life-changing thing. And ever since.

Presenter17:30

Why can you explain that?

David Edgar17:32

I think because it, you know, there's a big magnet in this country that pulls you south, and I think it just put me in touch with a different world. Next piece of music.

David Edgar17:41

I like folk rock. I you know, this is a confessional programme, and Steel Life Spanish is my favorite group, and they did a a version of of the traditional Gao Wasser, which I've chosen chosen partly because I once had the original version in a play, but mainly because I feel on a desert island I would need Christmas, and this would give me Christmas.

Speaker 418:00

Wassile, wassile thrown a town Our cupboard is white and our oil it is brown

Speaker 418:12

Was Isle is a might of the good isle on kite Some nutmeg and ginger the bust we could buy

Presenter18:29

Steel Eyes Spann and the Gower Wassail. Your nineteen seventy six play, Destiny, David Edgar, about the the threat of the National Front was the turning point for you professionally, wasn't it? It was uh produced by the RSC, transferred to London, made a couple of years later into a play for Today for the BBC.

Speaker 418:39

Yeah.

Presenter18:46

Obviously, you suddenly realized you could sustain yourself as a playwright. How much influence would you suggest that play had on political thinking at the time?

David Edgar18:54

Well, I think it did have a bit as part of something else. I mean, it was part of a general campaign against the the rise of the National Front, who really from nineteen seventy five onwards were beginning to get quite high votes, though not very many councillors elected.

Presenter19:07

They were doing well in the Midlands and

David Edgar19:07

Well, in the Midlands, they were doing well in the Midlands and well in the North and well in East London. There was a feeling among Liberal progressive circles that this was just an anti-immigration pressure group. And there was a campaign by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism and a number of other groups to persuade people that they were in fact a neo-fascist party. And Destiny was part of that, and I think contributed to that. And the result of that was that we did persuade the British public of that fact, and Britain didn't have a serious far-right movement for 25 years as a result.

Presenter19:40

To a considerable influence in

Presenter19:43

Just tracing your political line then, because the the years that followed now we're into the the late seventies and the demise of the Callaghan government and the rise of Thatcherism. Would you claim to have been aware

Presenter19:54

That Labour was going to have to find a new position, that that Thatcherism wasn't a kind of, you know, four-year-old.

David Edgar19:59

I was in America in the 79 election and I was looking while I was over there at the rise of the sort of Reagan coalition. And I hope that led me to feel earlier than perhaps some other people that this was a sea change, this wasn't a a temporary blip and that we wouldn't have one term of Thatcherism and then as it were get back to normal.

Presenter20:20

But what you wouldn't have spotted, presumably, or wouldn't have thought was the solution coming from the position that you come from, was that in order to regain power Labour had to move

Presenter20:29

to the middle and actually completely desert the father.

David Edgar20:31

No, and it's weird that one of the things that about Labour's move to the middle, which is really a move to the idea that the market solves all problems, is the thing that Thatcherism seems to have failed on. I mean, if you come from the far left and the problem with the far left is it reduces everything to economics in a strange way, but Thatcher was a kind of refracted the other side of that coin but because she all the problem with Thatcherism is it says the only relations that really matter are economic relations. And so I think one of the mysterious things about New Labour is it's continued in that myth that the way to solve everything is to shove the market into it and and I don't think that works.

Presenter21:08

What did you think they should have done? I mean, you were sitting on the board of Marxism today at the time.

David Edgar21:12

Well, m the Marxism Today project in in the nineteen eighties was to try and revitalize the left, and I think it was one of the emphases it had was on was on a widening of the remit of politics to embrace culture.

Presenter21:26

Just answer me one point. You never joined the Communist Party, did you? Sat on the President.

David Edgar21:30

No, no, I was I was uh Marxism Today was was the Communist Party journal, but it was it really was no longer Marxism in a recognizable form.

Presenter21:38

for you consciously did not join the sea.

David Edgar21:40

No, I I've never joined anything and probably that's a demonstration of I mean it may be a sort of non-joining mentality.

Presenter21:48

Do you will?

David Edgar21:49

I vote, and I've always voted Labour, and I see no reason why I should ever vote anything else.

David Edgar21:54

Next piece of music, number six.

Presenter21:54

Yeah.

David Edgar21:55

Number six, talking of political commitment, is Shostakovich, who had a very complicated relationship with the Soviet Union and his attempts to be a good Soviet artist, but his also attempts not to compromise his own art in so doing. And I think that that tension produced some very wonderful symphonies. I've chosen the Tenth and the Second Movement, which has a wonderful kind of jazzy, drumbeat-y energy.

Presenter23:17

The opening of the second movement of Shostakovich Symphony No. ten in E minor with the Gutzenich Orchestra of Cologne conducted by Dmitri Kitayenko.

Presenter23:27

Um so the wall came down, David, in nineteen eighty nine. The great experiment had had failed. Communism was blown away really rather easily in the end. That must have been for someone like you

Presenter23:39

Dispiriting to say the least.

David Edgar23:41

Well, I did think it was important. I mean, quite a lot of people, I think, had never taken the Soviet Union very seriously and thought that, you know, a third of humankind were living in some kind of aberration and that there was something called true socialism which had never existed. And I'd increasingly during the 80s thought that wasn't a sensible view to hold. So when the wall came down, I felt I had to kind of confront that and write about it. And I'd written a series of three plays, which are about Eastern Europe after the wall came down, in order to try and make sense of it.

Presenter24:10

After

Presenter24:15

The middle of that trilogy of plays, Pentecost, does deal, doesn't it, with the nature of can history become irrelevant, really? It features a fresco, doesn't it, which has got piles of grime on it that's gathered over the years, and should that be scraped away and we should see the fresco clean and beautiful as it was? In other words, what's happened in the intervening years count for nothing? And that's the struggle for people of your beliefs, isn't it? Did the seventy or so years that occurred between nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighty-nine in the end count for nothing? Can they just be washed away like cleaning up a picture?

David Edgar24:47

Exactly. And that's indeed what the play was was partially about. And the answer is no. I think it was I think the dream of communism was an inherent dream. I don't think it was something sort of imposed by crazed German philosophers. I think it was something that arises out of out of very deep desires. And it had some achievements.

Presenter25:04

But it didn't work, and it was only able to operate on the basis of terror and oppression.

David Edgar25:06

I need to

David Edgar25:10

No, I think the Communist experiment absolutely has failed. I think that the ideals and dreams which gave rise to it have not failed, and I think continue to be remarkably resilient considering what's happening in the world. And as I said, I think there were movements that came out of the much derided 60s, particularly feminism and the environmental movement and the movement for civil rights, which I think have a genealogical relationship with the communist dream, are there in the communist manifesto and are being realized perhaps at last in a way that will make them sustainable. Record number seven. Well, record number seven is a great antidote to left-wing romanticism, which is Geoff is a Krupke from Westside Story, the American musical, one of the great theatrical inventions of the 20th century, and Westside Story being incomparably the greatest. It's sometime at his most muscular best as a lyricist before he went cute. And it's about a series of spurious excuses for young criminal behaviour, and therefore, as I say, a great antidote to romanticism.

Speaker 426:17

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, you gotta understand It's just our bringing upkee that gets us outta hand Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks Golly Moses, naturally we're punks Gee Officer Krupke, we're very upset

David Edgar26:29

Golly

Speaker 426:36

We never had the love that every child ought to get We ain't no delinquents were misunderstood Deep down inside us there is good

Presenter26:45

Part of GE Officer Krupke from the original cast recording a Westside story, composed, of course, by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

Presenter26:54

David, your life suffered a a a tragic upheaval when your wife, Eve, a feminist and a social activist whom you met and married, I think, when you were about thirty.

David Edgar27:04

Guthrins

Presenter27:05

She she died aged fifty two of of throat and and lung cancer. It's the kind of experience that must completely change the way you look at the world.

David Edgar27:14

Well it it it was an ex extraordinarily profound experience. I mean it was about seven months. We had the diagnosis in the summer and she died the the following March. And I think the you know you discovered things about each other that you had either forgotten or perhaps never knew or perhaps weren't even there before. I mean I think you kind of rise to that.

David Edgar27:36

And, you know, Eve was a demanding and sometimes imperious woman and surprise, surprise, that those characteristics didn't disappear when she discovered she'd got terminal lung cancer. But what she didn't have was she didn't have any martyrdom, she didn't have any self-pity and she wasn't in denial. And the absence of those three things, I think, is a pretty good definition of courage under those circumstances. And as I said at the time, I didn't know Eve was as courageous as she proved to be because I didn't know that anybody could be that courageous. Then the other thing she was determined about was that I should carry on my life. And I have fallen on my feet. I've got a delightful new partner, Stephanie Dell, who's an up-and-coming playwright. And she's got on terrifically well with Eve's two sons and obviously my stepsons and their partners and now babies. So that I think is another legacy.

Presenter28:33

But it i i it obviously was an experience rich in material for a playwright, dare I say, or a novelist. This is this is what happens to people who write.

David Edgar28:43

Well, I did start studying. Yeah, I mean, I started keeping a diary, and I thought to myself, well, am I going to, and should I feel guilty about thinking about using it? And I never actually did. I wrote an article, but I didn't use it theatrically. But I'm writing a radio play at the moment, which is actually about somebody who loses their memory and their partner who helps them through it. And it's partly, I think, about one of the things we did realize, which was that there are issues of control. There is a tussle. Eve was the one that was dying, and I was the person who was.

Speaker 228:54

Yeah.

David Edgar29:13

Running the ship and riding side saddle, and I was sort of dealing with doctors and so on. And, you know, there is a point, I mean, the night before she died, and I was trying to calm her down about something which she was justifiably annoyed about. And she said, I do have a right to my anger. And I think that was a moment of saying, you know, back off, David. You know, there are some things that can't be sorted, including the fact that I'm about to die. And I think this new play will, though, it's very tangential.

David Edgar29:39

And you know, it's not a autobiographical in that sense at all, but I think it will draw on.

David Edgar29:43

those experiences while she was uh well, as I say, you were riding side saddle on this terrible but extraordinary journey from life into death.

Presenter29:52

But it does sound as if this play you're writing will possibly be the most personal piece of work you've ever written.

David Edgar29:59

Certainly this new one I think will be a sea change.

Presenter30:04

Last record.

David Edgar30:05

I wanted something that I discovered recently and I bought this C D because I thought that my partner Stephanie might like it and she took one look at the C D cover and said, you bought this, it's a violinist called Sophie Sullivan, you bought this because she's gorgeous and I said I reject this calumny. So this is a meditation on Vorjak's Slavonic fantasy and it's played by one gorgeous woman I don't know to remind me of another one who I do.

Presenter31:00

Sophie Solomon, playing part of Meditation on Vorjak's Slavonic Fantasy from her album Poison Sweet Madeira. If you could only take one of those eight records, David, which one would you pick?

David Edgar31:10

O would be the B mana mass.

David Edgar31:12

Yeah.

Presenter31:12

Memories of school?

David Edgar31:13

No, because I mean, the the the thing about this procedure is you realize very early on that you're not going to do you know, you're not going to cover the ballpark and you know, no string-audets, no opera, no Jefferson Airplane. But Bach would be compulsory and I think he you know, he is the best.

Presenter31:27

And uh your book as well as an idea of Shakespeare.

David Edgar31:29

Well, the book is a book about being on your own, and it's Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling, which is his remarkable story of being a hostage in Beirut. And I do it because A, it would be nice to realise that there was somebody worse off than you are, but also because it really does demonstrate that if you're deprived, and particularly if you're deprived of other human contact, you can find things in yourself which, A, make you survive, but also that you can plumb pretty extraordinary depths and perhaps find things that weren't even there before. And so it would be, I think, an inspiration as well. And your luxury. Well, my luxury, oddly enough, Brian Keenan mentioned that one of the things he'd really like was the piano. I don't think being on the desertine should preclude normal human impulses. And my sister is a musician, and I think sibling rivalry should be maintained under all circumstances. So I'd like to learn to play the piano.

Presenter32:24

David Edgar, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc.

David Edgar32:27

Thank you.

Speaker 232:35

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.