Trying it On

David Edgar has spent a lifetime writing politically charged work that have challenged and questioned received wisdom. Now in his seventies, he has finally taken to the stage with a play that questions his own wisdom, asking how his generation morphed from the political activism of the sixties into folk content to vote for Trump and Brexit. When the play first aired back in 2018, I can’t imagine he thought the conundrum would still be so relevant eighteen months later.
It was a little disconcerting to find Edgar already mooching around the performance space of UEA’s tiny studio theatre when the audience took to their seats, not least as he was eating a banana. “If this was a proper play…” he begins, shouting over the chitter chatter of an expectant audience, and so begins an intricately constructed performance exploring  the political landscape of the last fifty years, masquerading as an intimate, informal chat. Using himself as a test case, Edgar attempts to find out how much of our former selves remain later in life. He wonders what happened to change the angry young man protesting against the Vietnam War into an established playwright adapting Dickens for the stage. Did he change or did the world change around him? What of his contemporaries? Why did so many of the Sgt Pepper generation turn their backs on revolution?   These are fascinating and thought-provoking questions, and he is such good company that eighty minutes slip by without me noticing he doesn’t answer any of them.
Instead, he delivers a potted history of those times, with a filmed assistance of the likes of David Aaronovitch and Paul Mason ruminating over the shifting sands of their political beliefs. It’s a dramatic technique most reminiscent of Mark Thomas’s polemical work - as talking heads are projected onto a handsomely dressed set of filing cabinets and cardboard boxes I am reminded of Cuckooed. Edgar may be a less accomplished speaker than Thomas – he’s not a performer after all – but what sets him apart is his self-deprecation. He delights in poking fun at himself, and while still driven by righteous indignation, he’s canny enough to realise how uneasily that sits with a comfortable life writing for the theatre while aspiring to appear on Desert Island Discs.
Trying it On has been likened to a TED talk, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Edgar doesn’t lecture his audience, and while he does attempt to rationalise his generation’s altered perspective, the play is more about sharing doubts than certainties. Faced with his increasingly tenuous conclusions, I confess that I found myself growing weary, though I should have known better – Edgar is a clever fellow, after all – as this was a cunningly placed trap. Just as doubts began to bubble to the surface, they were undercut by an audacious about-face that was as bold as it was surprising. To say more would be a major spoiler, but the move was so central to the play’s thesis it’s difficult to sensibly do otherwise. I can only say that if you have fallen across this review before seeing the play, you should perhaps stop reading now.
Having said that, anyone familiar with the work of the excellent LUNG Theatre group would have quickly started to wonder why Danielle Phillips (good in E15, outstanding in The 56) was moonlighting as a stage manager. Having spent the greater part of the performance studiously pressing buttons and twiddling knobs stage left, she breaks character by intruding into this “solo” show to tell Edgar off. Incandescent with rage at the platitudinous rhetoric she’s been forced to listen to, she provides the perfect counterpoint to Edgar’s faux sophistry. Now in character, he has to act his way through scripted bewilderment, so that ironically it is Phillips, an accomplished twenty-something actor, who does all the heavy lifting, driving forward the trajectory of the play by tacitly channelling the ideals of Edgar the younger.
The need to keep this big reveal a secret (to the extent that programs were only handed out after the performance in sealed brown envelopes) means Phillips has not received nearly enough credit for her contribution, which was to effectively shoulder  the abiding message of a maddeningly inconclusive yet utterly absorbing play. It’s a message of hope, that people change, but not always for the worst. That writing for people who already agree with you may not revolutionise, but might nudge things forward. That there’s still much to do, but a lot has been done. During the closing moments of the play, as the balloons literally go up, they turned and smiled at each other. It was a tiny moment of warmth which somehow summed up everything he had been trying to say with words - that we are all members one of another.