With two new plays opening this autumn, the veteran playwright talks about the risks of writing about real events and the threats to leftwing drama and politics

With the world premiere of The New Real, David Edgar achieves the rare distinction of having at least one play performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in six successive decades, starting with Destiny in 1976. However, 2024 is summed up for the dramatist by a line in one of the company’s most performed plays, Hamlet, when Claudius, addressing good and bad news, describes himself as having “one auspicious and one dropping eye”. Early in the year, Edgar suffered an eye injury that forced emergency surgery and slow recovery of full function.

“It’s getting better but it’s worse when I’m tired,” says the dramatist, 76. And he has reason to be fatigued. After a six-year gap since his self-performed memoir monologue Trying It On, he is currently commuting between rehearsals of two new plays. The New Real is about American and British spin doctors working on an eastern European election 20 years ago who stumble on the template for Trumpism and Faragism. It follows the opening, at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, of Here in America, a bio-drama set in 1952 in Connecticut, where the playwright Arthur Miller and his regular director Elia Kazan meet before the latter’s testimony to Senator Joe McCarthy’s inquiry into “Un-American” communists in US showbiz. The evidence broke the men’s friendship and inspired Miller’s great play about ruinous accusation, The Crucible.