Skip to main content
Work with the NEU
‘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

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?

Were you rebelling against your family?

Has the show changed during the tour?

Has performing the show shifted your perspective at all on acting?

Where might we be in another 50 years’ time?

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
STANDING HER GROUND: Welsh Labour Party MP Beth Winter (first from right front, when Welsh Labour Party MP) and Labour MP for Liverpool, Riverside, Kim Johnson (to her left) on the picket line outside the office of HM Treasury, in Westminster in February 2023
Interview / 6 May 2026
6 May 2026

David Nicholson spoke to BETH WINTER about her bid to become a Senedd member as an independent running on a community grassroots campaign

CWU leader Dave Ward
TUC Congress 2025 / 8 September 2025
8 September 2025

CWU leader DAVE WARD tells Ben Chacko a strategy to unite workers on class lines is needed – and sectoral collective bargaining must be at its heart