David Edgar is a skilled adapter, and is perhaps best admired for that talent. Nicholas Nickleby, his biggest ‘hit’, is probably also his best-known adaptation, but the plays we discuss in this chapter are also adaptations, and he has adapted or translated a number of classical dramas as well, such as recent versions of Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Brecht’s Galileo. In 2010 his highly successful adaption of Arthur & George, the prize-winning novel by Julian Barnes, was co-produced by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse.

In fact the subject of adaptation is a bit of a sore point with Edgar, who feels the dismissal of the artistry of adaptation by certain scholars and critics (for example, Michael Billington) is unfair and unreasonable. David Hare has also taken the critical establishment to task for finding the Tricycle’s tribunal play about the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, The Colour of Justice, created by Richard Norton-Taylor, not suitable for the Best Play Award of 1999, because they would not see editing as creative writing. The focus of our chapter on Edgar’s adaptations takes for granted that these are legitimate new plays in their own right, but we also seek to understand ‘the relationship between the original work and my [Edgar’s] perception of it’. We are also interested in the matters of aesthetic craft that shape the dramaturgy, and finally of course are committed to the political inquiry of the entire volume – what do the human exemplars here portrayed communicate via Edgar about themselves as political animals and intersubjective beings embedded in particular socii?