YouSaid · the spoken record

David Edgar

lines on the record: 48
first: 2006-07-30
most recent: 2006-07-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Will my luxury oddly enough at Brian Keelan mentioned what things he'd really like was a piano. I don't think being on the desert island 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 realize that you're 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 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because, I mean, the thing about this procedure is you realise very early on that you're not going to do, you know, you're not going to cover the ballpark and no strink or dirt, no opera, no Jefferson Airplane. But Bach would be compulsory, and I think he is the best.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly this new one I think will be a sea change I wanted something that I discovered recently, and I bought this CD because I thought that my partner, Stephanie, might like it, and she took one look at the CD cover and said, you brought this. It's a violin. It's called Sophie Sullivan. You bought this because she's gorgeous. And I said, I reject this calumny. So this is a meditation on Vorjak Slavonic fantasy, and it's played by one gorgeous woman I don't know to remind me of another one who I do.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not an autobiographical in that sense at all, but I think it will draw on those experiences while, as I say, you were riding side-saddle on this terrible but extraordinary journey from life into death.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I did start. 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 tossle. Eve is the one that was dying, and I was the person who was 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, no back off, David. 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 that's very tangential.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Dow, 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was an extraordinarily profound experience. I mean, it was about seven months we had the diagnosis in the summer and she died the following March. And I think 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. And, you know, Eve was 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 those 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, record number seven is a great antidote to left-wing romanticism, which is G Office of Kruppke from Westside Story, the American Musical, one of the great theatrical inventions of the 20th century, and Westside Story being incomparably the greatest, at Sontime at his most muscular best as a lyricist before he went cute. And it's about a series of spurious excuses for young criminal behavior. And therefore, as I say, a great antidote to Romanticism.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sixties, particularly feminism and the environmental movements 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and that's indeed what the play 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 very deep desires. And it had some achievements.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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've 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Numc 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, drumbeaty energy.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I've never joined anything, and probably that's a demonstration of, I mean, it may be a sort of non-joining mentality. I vote, and I've always voted Labour, and I see no reason why I should ever vote anything else.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will the Monsterday project in the nineteen eighties was to try and revitalize the left? And I think it was one of the emphases it had was on a widening of the remit of politics to embrace culture.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's weird that one of the things 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 fascism 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. Thatcher was a kind of refracted, the other side of that coin. The problem with Thatcherism, as 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 I don't think that works.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I was in America in the 1979 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 temporary blip, and that we wouldn't have one term of Thatcherism and then, as it were, get back to normal.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it did have a bet as part of something else, and it was part of a general campaign against the rise of the National Front really from nineteen seventy five onwards were beginning to get quite high votes, though not very many councillors elected.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like folk rock. This is a confessional program. And Steel Lifespan is my favorite group, and they did a version of the traditional Gao Wassel, which I've 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think because there's a big magnet in this country that pulls you south, and I think it just put me in touch for the different world”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, one of the great things that happened to me was I didn't get into Bristol because Bristol demanded a modern language's A-level if you read drama because I wanted to read drama, which is why I didn't apply to Oxford Cambridge. Who knows whether it would have got in. And so I went to my second choice, which was Manchester, and that was a life-changing thing. Why?”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, I mean, my mother was always very serious. My father one or two place not, I think, because of their politics, but because 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 the vast length. And my mother used to stump off down to London and go to strange 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. But with great assiduousness. So I think they've been terrifically supportive under often difficult circumstances.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, who knows? I do think being at a public 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 May Days. And it was partly as a sort of self-exploration. And the central characters 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the next piece of music is actually speech, and I want a piece of speech, and I've 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 twentieth 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 desperate backgrounds in a common cause and up against very considerable odds. And it succeeded. I mean, 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, and he then goes back to the South at the very end and then builds up to an extraordinary climax.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and that was a big, that did feel as if 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think the first two years, Andel were pretty horrible and among the worst years of my life, and the second two years were pretty good. Bullying, are we talking here? Well, you know, I didn't like being away from home, and I wasn't very sporty.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 in that first year, I managed to persuade the school that I should be transferred back onto the track I wanted to be.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in fact, I set up a drama club in order to do that. So I set up a drama club in friendly rivalry with the school play, again, for reasons of aggrandizement, of control freakery, in order to direct at that point I wanted to be a director.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 altar, and the alto section is always a very small part of the choir in a boys' school because for reasons of a self-esteem, you want to get down to the tenors as quickly as you can. And Bach realized 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 alto's moment of.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Card parts for myself to play. A little later on I played at the age of thirteen at my old boys school Miss Prism in the importance being earnest and the family myth is that my mother said afterwards well it's not going to be acting, is it, dear?”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And neither of a childhood deprivation nor an unhappy childhood. So I don't end up being a playwright being well equipped at all.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 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 as the first Beatles single after they started getting number ones not to be number one, which is Strawberry Fields forever.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely right, as opposed to billions because in which it's all the combinations of three bulls and then you shut up shop. But no, I'm absolutely a snooker player.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love me. No, I think theatre, you just see 20 people on a stage moving about, and it's just such an exciting thing to look at.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's sort of early forties and then you can do it with Les and the new version I've done for Chichester is 23, which is still substantial, but it's like...”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did. We originally thought of it as one Shakespeare length show, and it was very quickly apparent that that was not going to work. And so we thought, well, we'll do it in two parts, Second Henry IV, Part 1 and 2. And then that'll be fine, and we'll have two sort of sensibly length things. And then the first preview of part two, 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Chichester this year and the old deer seems to stand up.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I kind of, he rang up and explained why the RSC wanted, and I was in America to happen, 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 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 Nickleby Snickleby. And so I read it, I read half of it. It's very long. On the plane on the way home, in this particular case decided not to follow Eve's advice. And I entered a rehearsal room with four.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first record is from Nicholas Nickelbe, and I think Stephen Oliver's incidental music for Nicholas Nickleby is by a writer who's written the best incidental music for theatre since Mandelson. And I think it's just a wonderfully sustaining piece.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was. She was one of the first, she was the Angela Rippin of her day 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 twenty in nineteen sixty eight, which was 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father's always a conservative. My mother, who died just before Christmas was more eccentric and eclectic in her political view. It's not always entirely consistent. But no, you're right. I mean, my parents met on the stage doorsteps of the Birmingham Raptory Theatre in the late 30s 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 and gave it up. There was a well-known vo”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because I think the big theme of what I've always written is about the gap between ideals and reality. And I think that will never go away.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the fear at the moment is that there are 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.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was. I think politics came back with a vengeance with 9-11, really, when people suddenly were reminded that politics could kill. I think that for 20 years, the remit of politics had reduced. But I think generally you're right. I think the last 30 years have seen a decline in the power of the public realm in general.”
2006-07-30 · Desert Island Discs · David Edgar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source