David Edgar’s original plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company include Destiny (1976), Maydays (1983, Plays and Players best play award, revived in 2018, broadcast on radio in 2023) and Pentecost (1994, Evening Standard best play award), the second in a series of plays about Eastern Europe after the Cold War, following The Shape of the Table (National Theatre 1990) and preceding The Prisoner's Dilemma (RSC, 2001).
His adaptations include Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (RSC, 1980, Olivier and New York Tony best play awards; television version: Emmy award), Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (Birmingham Rep, 2010) and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (RSC, 2017, 2018, 2022). In 2018 he wrote and presented a solo show, Trying it On, which toured in 2018 and 2019.
David Edgar has written for radio, television and film. In 1989, he founded Britain's first graduate playwriting course, at the University of Birmingham. His book about playwriting, How Plays Work, was published by Nick Hern Books in 2009. In 2023 he received an Outstanding Contribution award from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, of which he has been an active member for many years.
