MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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‘Are we the same person? If not, when and why not?’
Radical playwright DAVID EDGAR talks to Mayer Wakefield about the personal and political questions posed in his one-man show Trying It On in which, at the age of 70, he confronts his 20-year-old self
David Edgar
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
WHAT did a 20-year-old David Edgar make of events in 1968?
I was very inspired by them. I came to university from a public school, where I’d been involved in CND and was very much opposed to the Vietnam war.
But when I got there, I was quite taken aback by the revolutionary left, whose rhetoric and politics were much further to the left than anything I’d come across before.
In April 1968, I found a mentor — a leading radical student — who said to me just after the Tet offensive: “Why do you think the Viet Cong were able to get into the compound of the [US] embassy?
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