Trying It On

David Edgar

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781788501132
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

It's 1968. David is twenty. It is the height of the worldwide student revolt. The Vietnam war rages. Enoch Powell delivers his 'Rivers of Blood' speech. Martin Luther King is assassinated. These events will define David's politics and give focus to his writing.

It's fifty years on. The seventy-year-old is confronted by the twenty-year old. Do they share the same beliefs? If not, is it the world that's changed, or him?

David Edgar's Trying It On is an autobiographical monologue, written to be performed by its author.

It was first presented by Warwick Arts Centre and China Plate, touring the UK in 2018, including performances at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the Midlands Arts Centre and at the Royal Court Theatre, London – as well as at the Royal Shakespeare Company, alongside the RSC's revival of Edgar's landmark play Maydays.

Scene One: Warnings

DAVID. If this was a play, it would be clearer when it had started.

The lights would go down.

I wouldn’t have to introduce Danni our stage manager.

Because there’d be a programme.

And if it was a play by me, there’d probably be warnings. Which is often a issue between playwrights and management.

And although I’ve had smoke and flashing lights and nudity in my plays, involving people of both sexes, you’ll be relieved to hear not this one, my big problem’s been with armaments. So when the RSC did my play Pentecost – which is about a fresco in an East European church, which is taken over by asylum seekers – there was a big debate about whether we should warn about gunfire.

And there were two things. One is that if you draw attention to upcoming gunfire, as soon as anything vaguely cylindrical appears on the stage, people start wincing and sucking their teeth. But the other thing is that, in Pentecost, if you know there’s gunfire then there comes a point when you know how the play is going to end.

So we negotiated. And we thought about kind of obscuring what was going to happen, either by generalisation (‘Pentecost includes effects’),

equivocation (‘Pentecost may contain gunfire’),

or camouflage (‘Pentecost contains some but not all of the following…’).

But then something struck me. Maybe we’re looking at this thing the wrong way round. Far from warning too much, might we be warning too little?

Aren’t there things people have a right to know about, beyond smoke and bangs?

‘This production has at least one catastrophic piece of miscasting.’

‘There is a significant longeur towards the beginning of Act Two.’

‘The management knows about the lighting.’

So. You may be invited to answer challenging and potentially revealing questions.

The actor has not acted since he played Captain Bligh in a university production of The Mutiny on the Bounty.

He hasn’t even learnt his lines, and is thus reliant on potentially hostile technology. But in very capable hands.

Slight pause.

There will be elements of self-exposure.

Things remembered may be things imagined.

If this was a play, or a certain sort of play, its written text would start with a stage direction.

Scene Two: Room

A projection: the Birmingham skyline.

DAVID. An old man in a room at the top of his house. The window looks out over what might seem a contradiction in terms: a breathtaking view of the Birmingham skyline.

In front of the window is a desk, with a pair of filing cabinets at right angles to one side, and a green-baize-topped card table on the other, forming a kind of console, which surrounds him as he sits on his orthopaedic chair.

He wheels the chair to the centre.

On the desk, there is the remnant of a cigarette burn which dates the desk from at least before the 28th of March 1984.

But the most striking thing about the room is that it’s full of paper, mostly but not all in ring files, box files, and cardboard boxes, in which are large manilla envelopes, stuffed with cuttings. And for papers which haven’t quite yet found a home, or are between homes, piles.

The man is seventy. And the cardboard box he visits most now – both to add to it and to consult it – was marked Euro Pop-Right and was then marked Euro Pop-Right Brexit and now Euro Pop-Right Brexit Trump. And while these phenomena are generally worrying they are particularly so for someone who was twenty in 1968, fifty years ago, the annus mirabilis of the international student revolutionary left.

On the day that Hitler came to power, Goebbels said: ‘the year 1789’ – the year of the French Revolution – ‘is hereby eradicated from history.’You could say that the political project of Euro Pop-Right Brexit Trump is to do the same to 1968.

And there’s a particular irony in this. The year he was elected, Donald Trump was seventy.

Scene Three: First Survey

DAVID opens a filing cabinet and takes out a clipboard.

DAVID. Can I ask you some questions?

House lights up.

How many people in this room vote the same way as at least one of their parents? Show of hands.

Danni, could we have it a bit brighter?

House lights up further.

How many people have voted for more than one party?

How many people have ever voted Conservative?

How many people voted Brexit?

Well, that’s it. A completely representative sample. That’s if you are all telling the truth, which of course you are.

Now. Here’s a list of six characteristics of voters in the 2016 EU referendum.

What I want to know is which of these characteristics would make someone least likely to vote Brexit, and which one most.

He reads out a list, which is projected on the set.

One: Having a household income under twenty thousand pounds.

Two: Having voted Labour in 2015.

Three: Being sixty-five or over.

Four: Having a degree.

Five: Being in paid work.

Six: Thinking capitallism is a force for ill.

That’s capitalism with one L.

So what was the factor that made people least likely to vote Leave?

He takes suggestions from the audience.

Voting Labour in 2015.

Lest we forget, Labour delivered two-thirds of its vote to Remain, whereas nearly sixty per cent of Tory voters defied the advice of their party leader.

And what did people think was the most likely factor to make people vote Leave?

He takes suggestions from the audience.

Being sixty-five or over.

Leavers were not by and large working-class Labour voters from the north of England.

What they were was old. And old people are less likely than young people to be have a degree. They’re poorer. And more likely to support bringing back blue passport covers and the death penalty.

Nearly sixty per cent of sixty-five-plussers were between fifteen and twenty-five in 1968.

He puts the clipboard back in the filing cabinet and kicks it shut.

So, what happened to the Sergeant Pepper generation?

Why, fifty years on, does it seem to him that the political gains of that generation are going to be reversed, and the people who’re reversing them are the people that he thought those gains were for?

Scene Four: Backgrounds

DAVID. And so he sets to, to discover. He does what he always does. He reads books, watches documentaries, goes through files of newspaper cuttings and conducts interviews, largely with people who, like him, came of age between ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Let It Be’.

He asks about the kinds of backgrounds the people came from, and how that had influenced their politics. This is Martin Jacques, who went on to edit the journal Marxism Today.

Projections of the interviewees appear on the set.

MARTIN JACQUES. Well, both my parents worked during the war at Armstrong Siddeley, which was an aircraft factory in Coventry. And they joined the Communist Party in that period.

DAVID. And this is David Aaronovitch, of The Times, also from a Communist family:

DAVID AARONOVITCH. Some of the people we had coming into the house were delightful people. But it was always really the Russians. I was on the side of the Russians. I knew every kind of aeroplane flown in the second world war.

DAVID. Paul Mason the economist, he’s a bit younger.

PAUL MASON. Well, my family background is unusual because half of them are miners and weavers from Lancashire and half of them are Jewish tailors who went from somewhere in Russia via New York City and came to Liverpool.

DAVID. Sue Clegg, who’s a lecturer in Leeds.

SUE CLEGG. All my dad’s side was all miners… So there’s no doubt about working-class consciousness, is what I’m saying. And I knew I had to get out, cos I knew in those communities what happened to girls was, you got trapped.

DAVID. And Brian Goodwin and Jill Ambler, two friends from Birmingham.

BRIAN GOODWIN. My father – and obviously my mother – were involved in the general strike.

JILL AMBLER. My father was the fourth son of a Baptist Minister, of a Strict and Particular Baptist Minister.

DAVID. And Hilary Wainwright’s father was a Liberal MP.

HILARY WAINWRIGHT. But I could see there that the radicalism of my father – because he was quite a radical Liberal – was not consistent with capitalism and therefore it was like a dead-end to remain in the Liberal Party.

DAVID. 1968 revolutionary leader Tariq Ali, who was brought up in Pakistan:

TARIQ ALI. I grew up in a strange atmosphere, which was largely meeting Communist intellectuals, trade unionists, peasant leaders, and occasionally meeting people from a completely different background who were in some shape or form running the country.

DAVID. And I asked them whether their politics arose out of their personal experience.

PAUL MASON. So I went to a Catholic grammar school, and almost, you know, if you want to decipher the subte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Dedication
• Original Production
• Characters
• Scene One: Warnings
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information