My relationship with David Edgar's plays has been mixed: I think my still-strong memories of enjoying
Pentecost in the '90s make me always want to give his new work a try, but the RSC's most-commissioned modern writer was also responsible for the notoriously dreary
Written on the Heart, and after last week's meh
Here In America I felt a bit of trepidation towards the second of his premieres this autumn.
The New Real is also described by the blurb as both "epic"
and "panoramic," so they're really making sure you know it's going to be long. Still, my first show at Stratford's The Other Place since it was serving as The Courtyard twelve years ago turns out to be flawed, but worth checking out. Edgar returns to Eastern Europe and an unnamed former Soviet state, in a story spanning the last 22 years and looking at the question that has been worrying many political playwrights: How did politics move so far to the Right and so far from reality in that time?
