Dic Edwards

Dic Edwards is a British playwright and poet with more than 20 productions to his name. Born in Cardiff Edwards has often found himself at odds with his Welsh background. This was never more in evidence than in 2002 when Welsh Nationalists took to the stage and conducted walk outs during the run of his play Franco’s Bastard at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. In a debate in parliament on Welsh issues in 2002, the demonstrations against Franco’s Bastard were cited as examples of Nationalist intolerance (Hansard 2002).

Edwards first play At The End Of The Bay, produced at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff 1982, appeared at a time when new theatre in the English language in Wales was almost non-existent. At this time Edwards met the great English playwright Edward Bond who immediately became a mentor for Edwards.

Edwards calls his theatre the Theatre of The Evicted and plays like Looking For The World (Sherman Main Stage, Cardiff, 1986); Long To Rain Over Us (The Haymarket, Leicester 1987); Low People (The Haymarket, Leicester 1989) and the fourth world (Theatr Clwyd, 1990) are early expressions of his theories.

Through Bond, Edwards was introduced to the Royal Court Theatre which awarded Edwards a small grant from the Neville Blond Fund to research a play about the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The result of this research was the play Wittgenstein’s Daughter produced at The Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow in 1993. In the previous year, The Citizens Theatre had produced Edwards' Casanova Undone. On both occasions, Edwards worked with the Goethe Award winning director Robert David MacDonald. It was also at this time that Edwards’ work began to be published by Oberon Books Ltd. London.

In 1992, Edwards began a collaboration with Mark Dornford May and Broomhill Opera in Kent and produced the libretto for The Juniper Tree with composer Andrew Toovey and the book for the reworked Beggar’s Opera, The Beggars’ New Clothes with the Eos Ensemble and conductor Charles Hazlewood.

Throughout the nineties, while producing the plays Utah Blue, a drama about the life and death of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore (The Point, Cardiff 1995 and NIDA, Sydney Australia 2005) and Lola Brecht (UK Tour), Edwards worked extensively with Community/TIE company Spectacle Theatre producing plays for the community – Over Milk Wood (published by Oberon and by Aerola Editors, Tarragon as Sobre El Bosc Lacti) and Kid (Wales and Northern Ireland Tour published by Argraff) as well as those plays collected in the publication The Shakespeare Factory and other plays (Seren).

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