Edgar The New Real

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78850-819-3
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Modern Plays

It's the 2000s. We're in a faraway country. Rachel, a stellar American political strategist, and Caro, her British data expert, have been hired to fight a ferocious election, in a place where it's hard to tell what's real and what's fake. They think they're here to teach the Eastern Europeans how to do democracy, but it turns out they're here to learn. And when Rachel's former political partner turns up on the rival side, their showdown threatens to change global politics, from Warsaw to Wisconsin. Forever. The New Real is David Edgar's epic, panoramic play about how the political fault-line was redrawn. It is an origin story, for right now. It was first performed in 2024 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Headlong at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Holly Race Roughan. 'Edgar's writing has a vigour, a swagger, a taut, tense texture that portrays men and women in the white heat of ambition, duplicity, conscience and tortured idealism'Sunday Times 'There is no more incisive commentator on politics currently working in British theatre'The Times

David Edgar is a leading UK playwright, author of many original plays and adaptations. He also pioneered the teaching of playwriting in the UK, founding the Playwriting Studies course at Birmingham University in 1989. His plays include: The New Real (Royal Shakespeare Company / Headlong, 2024); Here in America (Orange Tree Theatre, 2024); Trying It On (UK tour, 2018); A Christmas Carol, adapted from the story by Charles Dickens (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2017); If Only (Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 2013); Written on the Heart (RSC, 2011); a version of Ibsen's The Master Builder (Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 2013); Arthur and George, adapted from the novel by Julian Barnes (Birmingham Rep & Nottingham Playhouse, 2010); Testing the Echo (Out of Joint, 2008); A Time to Keep, written with Stephanie Dale (Dorchester Community Players, 2007); Playing With Fire (National Theatre, 2005); Continental Divide (US, 2003); The Prisoner's Dilemma (RSC, 2001); Albert Speer, based on Gitta Sereny's biography of Hitler's architect (National Theatre, 2000); Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (Birmingham Rep, 1996); Pentecost (RSC, 1994); The Shape of the Table (National Theatre, 1990); Maydays (1983); The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (RSC, 1980); Destiny (1976); and The National Interest (1971). His work for television includes adaptations of Destiny, screened by the BBC in 1978, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, televised by the BBC in 1981, and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, televised by Channel 4 in 1982, as well as the plays Buying a Landslide (1992) and Vote for Them (1989). He is also the author of the radio plays Ecclesiastes (1977), A Movie Starring Me (1991), Talking to Mars (1996) and an adaptation of Eve Brook's novel The Secret Parts (2000). He wrote the screenplay for the film Lady Jane (1986). He is the author of How Plays Work (Nick Hern Books, 2009; revised 2021) and The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (1988), and editor of The State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting (2000). He was Resident Playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974-5 (Board Member from 1985), Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic, Bicentennial Arts Fellow (US) (1978-9) and was Literary Consultant for the RSC (1984-8, Honorary Associate Artist, 1989). He founded the University of Birmingham's MA in Playwriting Studies in 1989 and was its director until 1999. He was appointed Professor of Playwriting Studies in 1995.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Edgar, David

Leseproben

Scene One

DR KENNETH HELMS

KEN. Okay, imagine this. A time, the recent past. Across significant swathes of the world, entrenched regimes cling to power. As the gap between the benefits they promised and their actual achievements widens, young people in particular challenge those regimes. They demand individual and cultural liberation which those regimes cannot deliver.

Foreign military adventures and appeals to patriotism fail to stem the rising tide of protest. These increasingly revolutionary movements reach a climax in a year whose very date has come to define the might of its ambitions.

I am speaking of course not of one year but two.

1968: the year of student uprisings throughout the West against the war in Vietnam. ‘The whole world watching.’ But also 1989: the liberation of East Europe from the communist yoke. The whole world watching.

And of course the irony was this. The Western student revolutionaries of 1968 were trying to overthrow capitalism. While, in the east, the revolutionaries of 1989 were planning to restore it.

So after communism fell, a group of Eastern European countries resolved to reinvent themselves as free market, liberal democracies. And to this end invited a group of smart young Americans to tell them how to do it.

Which is what we did.

Scene Two

NATALIA OLEG OLEG NATALIA NATALIA

OLEG. Miss – Miss –

NATALIA. Yes?

OLEG. Forgive that I approach you.

NATALIA. Uh – I’m kinda, in a rush?

OLEG (). I think you may leave this in the lecture hall.

NATALIA. Oh my God. Uh, thanks, so much.

OLEG. Of course I read most carefully full campus guidelines on Appropriate Relational Behaviours.

NATALIA. What?

OLEG. I am not sort of guy who chases ladies out of lectures.

NATALIA. No, I didn’t –

OLEG. Unless they leave behind most valuable trumpet.

NATALIA. Uh, I – You looked?

OLEG. I am so admiring.

NATALIA. It is not rocket science. You just blow. Now, look, I’m sorry…

OLEG. You know, I think maybe my country is our country.

OLEG

(.) Da ne bi da ste ot Kosice? Az sum ot Stal’ko. [Might it be that you’re from Kosice? I am from Stal’ko.]

NATALIA () Da, ot Kosice sum. Yavno sme sunarodnitsi. [Yes I am from Kosice. It appears that we are co-nationals.]

(.) But maybe I prefer to speak in the language of the country I am in.

OLEG. I am from Stal’ko.

NATALIA. What does your family do, in Stal’ko?

OLEG. My grandfather died defeating fascism. For many years my father was manager in the Red October Aeronautic Military Transport Facility Number Seventeen.

NATALIA. Which produced?

OLEG. That actually rocket science.

NATALIA

And is now the AeroSuperCorp, own by some Americans. We are moving to Kosice when I am twelve. And you?

NATALIA. My mother runs a little bank.

OLEG. So do you like the lecture?

NATALIA. Did you like it?

OLEG. Smart Young American informs us proudly how he spent the 1990s instructing Russia, oh, and Poland and Ukraine and in fact our country, how to turn our countries into his.

NATALIA. On our invitation.

OLEG. And what d’you think about our radiant future now? In this new century? ‘The end of history’? Free market heaven? In fact, to my mind, just piles of capitalist everything?

NATALIA. As opposed to piles of communist nothing.

OLEG. You like it?

NATALIA. No, I love it.

Yes, of course it’s brash and gaudy. Yes of course the constant showing-off. But just – the

OLEG. Between?

NATALIA. Sushi or McDonald’s. Walmart or Bloomingdale’s. Sex or drugs or rock and roll.

OLEG. You have to choose?

NATALIA

NATALIA. What do you study?

OLEG. Politics.

NATALIA. Really.

OLEG. You?

NATALIA. Uh – Business.

OLEG. Really.

NATALIA. Yes.

OLEG. And do you stay? Or do you go back, and help to make our country work? Not just for the Americans?

NATALIA. I want to make me work.

OLEG. What does that mean?

NATALIA. It means I do not just choose from piles of everything. I can also choose any kind of person I can be.

And now, I really must…

OLEG () Mozhe bi, shte se sreshtnem otnovo? [Maybe we will meet again.]

NATALIA. Yes, perhaps we will.

OLEG () Ne tuk, no mozhe bi tam? [Not here, but maybe there.] Not here but there.

NATALIA. Well…

OLEG. Maybe in Garden of War Heroes. Where I am meeting my first girlfriend.

NATALIA. I think they maybe call it something different now.

OLEG. And see if history is really over after all.

RACHEL

RACHEL. So here you are, you fuck.

Scene Three

LARRY YEATES RACHEL MOSS

LARRY. Rachel.

RACHEL. You just carry on.

LARRY. Sure will.

RACHEL. Pretend I’m not here.

LARRY. That’s the plan.

RACHEL. You know we’re virtually the only people left?

LARRY. Strategists. Always last to go.

RACHEL. Even the fucking candidate’s fucked off.

LARRY. And why might that be?

RACHEL. You tell me.

LARRY RACHEL

LARRY. Because you and I could have won this thing for him. Because we were a slam dunk for a Democratic grab here and we pissed it all away.

RACHEL. By .

LARRY. Yeah, and why?

RACHEL. Why do you think? The dirty / tricks –

LARRY. Oh, so not the fact that / you –

RACHEL. Paying hecklers to go round disrupting Franklyn rallies.

LIUDMILLA BEZBORODKO

LARRY. Franklyn, the opposing candidate.

RACHEL. That’s the rallies you haven’t called the venue up to cancel. And that’s not to mention the imaginary ‘Lesbians for Franklyn’.

LIUDMILLA

LIUDMILLA. ‘Lesbians for Franklyn’?

LARRY. And if a man can’t take a fucking piss –

RACHEL ( LIUDMILLA). An entirely invented organisation, claiming to be an official part of our opponent’s campaign, to discredit him in the eyes of his conservative Christian base. Who are naturally leery about lesbians.

LIUDMILLA. Ah. False flag operation.

RACHEL (). Yes…

LIUDMILLA ( RACHEL). So you are –

LARRY ( LIUDMILLA). The Lone Ranger. Death Before Dishonour.

RACHEL. Larry, you promised, after Illinois. No more false flags or illicit phone recordings. No more dark / ops –

LARRY. But the moment when things go seriously belly up is when – rather than saving jobs in mines and auto plants – she insists our candidate comes out for men getting married. To each other.

LIUDMILLA. Is this serious / proposal –

RACHEL. Tested, in five focus groups.

LARRY. By your girl from London, who thinks rubbers are items of stationery.

RACHEL. She’s not a girl.

LIUDMILLA. But rubbers / stationery –

LARRY ( LIUDMILLA). Rachel’s Law. Make people feel good about what they’re voting for, i.e. saving jobs, not two guys kissing on a fucking cake.

RACHEL. Which went down like gangbusters with soccer moms and urban aspirationals.

LIUDMILLA. Why a cake?

LARRY ( LIUDMILLA). And like shit with what she charmingly describes as ‘Lunchpail Losers’.

RACHEL. Oh, Larry, please. No more ‘what about Joe Sixpack and the simple homely folks you hail from back in Rust Belt Michigan’. Please not your mother.

LIUDMILLA. So you are –

LARRY ( LIUDMILLA). And this is Rachel Moss, whose ‘people’ packed her off to Princeton –

RACHEL. Berkeley.

LIUDMILLA. So you are Rachel Moss?

RACHEL LARRY

RACHEL. Um… maybe we should just let you, get on with… / cleaning…

LIUDMILLA. I am already getting on. And you are Larry Yeates.

LARRY. And you are – ?

LIUDMILLA. I ask for you, they say you piss off to restroom with your party bag and tail...