The Pimp [2006]

Presented by White Bear Theatre

Baudelaire, a young dandy who’s just inherited a fortune, meets Jeanne Duval an actress/whore he’s admired voyeuristically. He wants her but is unable to give her the sex that would prove to her that she’s his, so they make a contract in which he agrees to finance her life in order to possess her.
Ancelle, the Baudelaire family solicitor discovers that Baudelaire is having an affair with – as far as he’s concerned a “nigger” and, convinced that she’ll use up the money convinces Baudelaire’s mother that they should apply to the Court to have Baudelaire’s inheritance from him and the money, instead, doled out in small amounts. The mother, secretly in love with Ancelle, agrees to this arrangement. Thus begins an enormous struggle between Ancelle’s essentially capitalistic view of the world and Baudelaire’s poetic one which brings tragedy for Baudelaire.
Baudelaire who has idolised Ancelle believes when he hears that Ancelle will be responsible for the doling out of his money, that Ancelle will be sympathtic. So B. trusts the manufacturer of his despair. A despair which leads to violent recriminations against Jeanne and failure in his poetry and her subsequent hatred of his impotence. This culminates in his rape of Jeanne and acts of petty embezzlement against his own inheritance.
At his most miserable he discovers that he is to be prosecuted for six poems which have appeared in his one collection Les Fleurs du Mal and he believes, perversely, that the notoriety he is bound to realise will make him rich and solve all his problems. Instead, under pressure to preserve the respect of the family name he writes to the Empress asking for clemency, denies the six poems and seals his fate.

Astrakhan Winter - 2005

Astrakhan Winter is a story of things killed and died for: a Western intellectual returns home having interfered in a foreign revolution, leaving a bloody mess behind; a disaffected youth just out of prison discovers the fine line between belonging and escaping; a refugee suffers the secrets of unjust war.

I believe that wars are fuelled by the vanity of leaders. No matter how much they believe in their cause or how much good they think they do, their vanity determines that they will ultimately do the wrong thing. It’s not for any man to declare any measure of saintliness for himself. This is the template for Walker.

The good person is the humble refugee Smerdyakov who is doomed by his goodness to bear the cross he is bound to invent. Other characters try to find truth in the confusion created by Walker; limited by their humanness they become obsessive and are driven to conclusions like Luke’s that in the end only the terrorist will be Good.

One of my revisited themes is the notion of eviction and the idea that normal society evicts the passionate and the truth seekers. Smerdyakov dies because he is a truth seeker; a refugee arrived in an indecent world, one determined by Walker’s vanity.

Astrakhan (Winter) is published in the book 'Astrakhan (Winter) and Other Works'

Manifest Destiny – Libretto [2003]

Written with composer Keith Burstein (www.keithburtsein.co.uk) Manifest Destiny is an opera that looks at the “war on terror” primarily from the point of view of a suicide bomber, Leila.

The opera follows a post 9/11 love affair between a Jewish composer and Leila Muslim poet and features the US President among it’s cast of characters.

The 30 minute first act , which moves between London and the Middle East, was presented as a concert performance with piano and singers at The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone on Saturday November 22nd .

Manifest Destiny is published in the book 'Astrakhan (Winter) and Other Works'

Distant Jazz [2003]

Presented by Spectacle Theatre

Julie is fifteen. She’s come to a room in a desolate Merthyr to abort her pregnancy. pregnant Julie looks out and sees Michael, the young man responsible for her condition. In the street a lonely saxophone plays – except she knows that the music isn’t there – it belongs not to distance but time past. though they are only a street apart, they will never again meet.

From the hollow of her lonely night, she tries to understand why her mother told her the terrible lie that seems so responsible for her unhappiness.
During the course of the play, time implodes and distant tragedies have their meaning revealed.

Franco's Bastard [2002]

Produced by Script Cymru , and presented at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff in April 2002

Read 'In Search of Franco' , Dic Edward's notes and diary on the process of getting Franco's Bastard onto paper and on to the stage. "

"It began on that night in the early seventies when Cayo smashed a bottle on my head before a henchman called Osborn broke my jaw with a hammer. And on that night, not only was this play born but I became a dramatist."

Drawing on personal experience of Julian Cayo Evans, self-styled leader of the Free Wales Army, Franco’s Bastard is a richly written and very funny play looking at the absurdities of nationalism through the eyes of Carlo – a romantic fascist who believes himself to be the illegitimate son of General Franco and “a horse owner and citizen of Rome.”

While dreaming of the day when a new Wales will dawn, Carlo Francisco Franco Lloyd Hughes’s “project” goes strangely awry, when he falls in love with a mixed-race woman from Cardiff and meets a playboy called Ben, who murdered his boss with a frozen fish

"CARDIFF isn't really Wales - it's a place all to itself." It's precisely this attitude - casually aired by the cab driver taking me to the city's Chapter Arts Centre - that enrages Carlo, the fascistic Welsh nation-builder at the heart of Dic Evans's coarsely enjoyable, controversy-stirring satire Franco's Bastard.

Posing as an illegitimate son of the Spanish dictator, Carlo is disgusted as much by the political apathy of his fellow Welshmen as he is by the imperialist English, whose accursed influence he wishes to scrub out by military means. Imagine his joy, then, when he is introduced to a young man called Ben, who, he is told, has fled his job in a Cardiff fish suppliers' after decapitating his English boss with a three-foot frozen salmon. "I love this boy!" he exclaims.

Carlo is modelled quite openly on Julian Cayo Evans, the self-styled leader of the Free Wales Army, whose minor-league terrorist activities resulted in an 18-month prison sentence in 1969, timed, so it was said, to coincide with Prince Charles's investiture.

Given that Evans died in 1995, you could say that Edwards, who knew the man, has left it rather late to lampoon his pretensions. Certainly, you need to know more than the programme notes tell you to get all the references: like Evans, James Coombes's Carlo struts around a rustic mansion to martial music, wears a green tunic (claimed to be Franco's) and a bandana, and talks fondly of the Appaloosa horses he breeds out back.

Even if some of the jokes are recondite, no audience member should have difficulty recognising the contentious relevance of the material, which identifies and sends up Welsh insecurities to the hilt, while sounding a loud warning shot about attempted remedies. Carlo's insistence that "the only way you can convince the English of democratic values is by bombing them" has an all-too-contemporary simple-mindedness, while recent reports that the BNP is setting up a Welsh branch find their correlative in Carlo's inability to work out how his Jamaican lover (Karin Diamond) fits into his vision of a new Wales.

Admittedly, the play's structure is more ramshackle than an abandoned colliery, but Simon Harris's perky production for Sgript Cymru embraces its slapdash charm. James Coombes - a camply preening Carlo - with Shane Attwooll as his psychotic sidekick, Seon, and Adam Randall as the reluctant insurgent Ben, are certain to raise smiles and not a few hackles.

reviewed by Dominic Cavendish, The Daily Telegraph April 16 2002

Into the East [2001]

Produced by Spectacle Theatre, Autumn 2001 and toured Wales

It has been an unpredictably fruitful creative relationship, this unlikely pairing of playwright Dic Edwards and Glamorgan-based YPT company Spectacle Theatre. Edwards, after all, is an irredeemably cerebral writer, as unrelenting as his mentor Edward Bond, while Spectacle offer a service to young people that is of necessity accessible and immediately relevant. The likelihood of the author of Wittgenstein's Daughter, Regan and Utah Blue, sprawling complex philosophical tracts each, targeting primary schoolchildren seemed unlikely. But it has worked for some while now.

I hesitate to hazard a guess as to how much this is due to the perseverance of director Steve Davis and the commitment of the company but I do suspect that Into the East as produced to rapt young audiences may be some way down the line from any original Edwards script. This is, of course, a perfectly proper process and, it seems to me, does result in the company having to work extra hard to find points of contact which creates an urgency wrought out of real struggle - it has been there in several of these collaborations, from Kid to Antigone Now.

Into The East, as you might expect, does not opt for a safe subject or easy themes and while some adults may be familiar with the context it’s not a story young people are likely to know. Set in the Czech Jewish ghetto of Terezin, a transit camp prior to transportation to Auschwitz, it’s based on the story of the creation of the children’s opera Brundibar by Hans Kraza, composed in 1938 but performed in Terezin during World War II. We follow the narrative of two children inspired by a new arrival to find hope - sort of, since Edwards’s script is a twisting and turning debate about truth and knowledge, hope and despair, change and defeat, idealism and realism.

Those debates are engaged with according to the competence of the audience, of course, and one can see how the play could have started life as a sophisticated post-modern battle involving the forces of existentialism, Marxism, pragmatism and so on, fought in the light of hindsight - adults would know that these characters do end up in Auschwitz - but the opera does get performed (it was actually produced 55 times in Terezin, despite its blatant anti-Nazi allegorical plot). What’s particularly remarkable about Into the East is that it speaks to a wide age range: I saw it at a secondary school in Bargoed, where potentially noisome teenagers looked utterly engaged, but the company say that responses in primary schools have been equally rewarding - and possibly more so in regards to the feedback sessions after the show.

I guess that’s because the combined forces of playwright and company produce something that works on many levels - from the relationship between siblings and the role of authority figures to the more vexed issues of whether it is better to know the truth or to dream. The dramatic irony - where the audience knows what is to happen while the characters do not - can be appreciated only by those who know their history but that question of whether to go along with a noble lie or accept a presumed inevitable fate was a cornerstone of philosophic enquiry until post-modern scepticism. One interesting facet of this production is how that conundrum is allowed to bubble away on an intellectual level while a very human drama is played out by the actors.

While appreciating the theatrical juggling Steve Davis achieves to keep all those balls in the air, I did find some aspects seriously problematic, especially those created around the saviour figure (played with lively charm by Huw Davies) who may well have worked in a longer piece but in a short slice of naturalism strikes me as too artificial, as was the dramatic metaphor of the near-death and transformation of the children’s music teacher (a role which ultimately even the valiant and experienced Brendan Charleson could not really bring off). Gwenfair Vaughan Jones and Gwion Huw explored the sister-brother relationship with subtlety and welcome credibility.

Guy O’Connell’s set design, with a floor consisting of photographs in the shape of the Star of David, may also have been clever but I suspect needed pointing out to audiences - quite literally in many performance spaces in schools, where poor sight lines mean that even the action is difficult to follow, never mind the significance of the floorcloth.

reviewed by David Adams 9 November 2001

Antigone Now [2000]

Produced by Spectacle Theatre in the Autumn of 2000 and toured Wales

Turning back not only to the words of past masters but to the structures of older plays Edwards presents the family as the space of reproduction and hence the site of struggle for what will come in the future. Unsurprisingly, then, his protagonists are frequently women, his concerns social rather than psychological. Perhaps this explains his fascination with abortive births, with deformity and with people cast out or expelled from normality (Alma Wittgenstein gives birth over the skeleton of the philosopher who was not her father; Regan in the play of that name was born deformed, the child in Low People is dumb; in Utah Blue , Gary Gilmore is impotent when free from prison, an artist of death rather than life). His new play, Antigone Now, draws on the Sophoclean pretext to address questions of personal responsibility and compromise. Where parents have abdicated their moral responsibilities, the children are bewildered and hurt and the daughter, as in the classical paradigm, is left to decide moral issues and to face the dark undercurrents that emerge violently into the present from a repressed past. In Antigone Now the son first spoils the exotic meal bought to celebrate his father's promotion to advertising executive and then takes its place in a ghoulish sacrificial exchange.

The Greeks saw the conflictual relations of the individual to the family, the state and the gods as the root of their drama and sought a resolution of this conflict through tragedy. In Edwards' modern version, the conflict is rendered absurd because, when the significance of the past is denied and reduced to isolated and meaningless moments, there can be no progression or development, no future. His Antigone Now investigates a world in which the past has been reduced to the absurdity of a video of the mother as beauty queen and sexual icon, while the present, outer comfort of a family disintegrating from within rests on promoting the stupidity of consumers who buy emptiness. It's a powerful play and it will be interesting to see it staged this autumn.
Jeni Williams New Welsh Review No. 50

Forget that intimidating Antigone in the title. You need know nothing of Greek mythology of Sophocles, Brecht or Anouilh to go through this cathartic experience of this emotionally draining drama from playwright Dic Edwards.

This is very much a tale of today, set not a million miles from Spectacle Theatre's Rhondda College base (the venue for this gala performance during the production's tour), even if its does take as its source the themes of family, guilt, respect, history, identity and power in the classic original.

A domineering, ambitious father with a dark secret, a finicky, self-obsessed mum still living in the past, an irresponsible joy-riding son and a conscientious schoolgirl daughter who just about hold the family together, all find their lives changed one winter's evening.

Antigone Now! is a working class tragedy - a deliberate contradiction in terms, since ordinary people don't usually experience tragedy in the classical sense, tragedy being the stuff of heroes and nobles. That conflict is at the core of this remarkable script, where Edwards not only has an everyday family living out a Greek myth but has their speech lurching from familiar conversation to high-flown lyricism as we are shown how the mundane can be as affecting as the classic.

When this production, directed by Steve Davis, works well (as it did in Llwynypia) the result is an intense, charged experience. At times it can seem like an uneasy mix of issue-driven Theatre-in-Education and timeless epic with no subtlety of character, but if you surrender to the unusual meld of vernacular and classical then the committed cast (Jeremi Cockram, Karen Wynne, Arwel Davies and Karin Diamond) will carry you with them
.reviewed by David Adams

Over Milk Wood [1999]

Spectacle Theatre Company, (Welsh Tour) 1999

Dic Edwards has created a sprawling great play, part pastiche, part comedy, part ideological tract, part detective story, and collapsed it [with help from director Steve Davis] into a little gem of a touring show that this week provocatively plays in an around Thomas's Swansea before heading east to Abergavenny [0n Friday] and Cardiff's Llanover Hall [on Saturday].
It is, I think the first time Dic Edwards, a fine playwright has not only written explicitly about Wales but actually addressed issues that many of his contemporaries have lived off all their careers: cultural identity, Welshness, the ambivalence of the Dylan heritage, secrets and lies. Because Mr Pugh's escape first to the Mumbles and then to the Bronx is both an attempt to exorcise the curse of being portrayed as a murderer, itself a double bind since inevitably it is also a metaphor for Wales trapped by its own mythology, and a voyage of self-discovery
Western Mail

Then of course, there was Spectacle Theatre with Dic Edwards's play Over Milk Wood. Hardly anyone turned up the night I saw it in Swansea's Dylan Thomas Centre (25/11/99): apparently it clashed with a production of A Child's Christmas in Wales in the Grand. Yet it was mischievously splendid. The play was an ironic love story with Huw Pugh, the would-be wife-poisoner, fleeing Wales after the first transmission of Under Milk Wood. Hidden behind a screen, a witch shadow-puppet figured the awful wife, leaping about enraged until she fell to her death from the bed. He meets his new wife on the boat to America: she's Irish but as soon as they arrive at New York she gains a rasping American accent, throwing away her past in her desire for a new identity. The figure of How Pugh, attempting to escape from the prison house of Thomas's words, cannot be free of his creator's voice. It invades his speech in delightful parodies and takes over his days as he works in a Welsh gift shop in New York, living in the Bronx. The third member of the cast swops identities with bewildering and hugely amusing ease. His appearance as a mad housewife (complete with lipstick and beard) is complemented by a wonderful appearance as a Jewish stereotype complaining about the noise.

Uncomfortable moments disrupt the slapstick however: when Huw re-encounters Sinead, ordering nineteen whiskies in the bar where Thomas drank eighteen, and later, when he attacks his wife and the couple risk losing their child. The echoes of Thomas and of Thomas's life (Irish wife, drunkenness, the passion of language, a sense of entrapment) focus on the essential interrelation of stories and life. No playwright in Wales can avoid the shadow of Milk Wood,or the shadow of its poet - a shadow projected onto the screen at this play's close while 'his' voice boomed out in sonorous sorrow that he died too soon and had never meant to leave the poisoning bit in, pleading majestically for readers to 'Shut the hook and read the poems'
New Welsh Review

Kid [1997]

Spectacle Theatre, TIE Welsh Tour and N. Ireland, 1997

"intelligent, carefully crafted and outstandingly performed.Kid is all about words, with a young boy who pretends he can't speak because his father bullies him with words. Edwards plays, provokes and jokes with language - but keeps his young (under-eights) audience enrapt with a simplicity that is unexpected from a man whose successes include a play called Wittgenstein's Daughterthis is good theatre for a purpose and even more vital in an age of computers and deliberate deschooling where verbal communication is too easily downgraded."
Western Mail

 

The Man Who Gave His Foot For Love [1996]

Spectacle Theatre Co. (Welsh Tour) 1996

"The best of the conventional plays was Dic Edwards' The Man Who Gave His Foot For Love which depicts a comically murderous Latin American reality, shrouded in crass superstition and the kind of myth to which only we fallible mortals could possibly give credencethe song lyrics are sometimes hauntigly poetic or rousing in the manner of Weil or Eissler. The Stage-craft, implicit in the structure, reveals the maturity of a writer who has synthesised plot, charcter, language and music to create an absurd universe in which black humour can flourish, weaving a disturbingly black spell around the audience, even as they laugh."
New Welsh Review

 

Lola Brecht [1996]

"Dic Edwards' plays are never easy but lola brecht has some very funny moments, some sharp satire and plenty of evidence of a clever mind at work."
The Guardian

"A black comedy which points as accusing and bloody finger at sexual frustrations as the root of all evil.
As the civil war bubbles outside their hotel, it echoes the conflict inside (Brecht's) head and in his bitching impotent marriage to Lola. .to be congratulated.
The Stage

"lola brecht is a good play with much to say about modern human frustrationsThere is a delightful dream-scene where Napoleon makes love with Lola and helps her give birth: to an array of weaponry! Excellent.
Western Mail

"The drama is often eased by comic touches - a wounded Peter realises that he loves ex-nurse Lola "for her nursing skill and knowledge of bandages!" But the underlying threat of excessive nationalism keeps this drama simmering. Dic Edwards has written a thought-provoking script."
Cambrian News

"lola brecht.is about war but also about peace. The strange state of mesmeric sub-violence we live in. People find no meaning in their lives, objects don't have a function anymore. It's like being in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and trying to find the bottom with your feet. The political leaders are zombies or puppets or clowns or sinister. And we're stranded in a strange hotel by a railway line. The play gives the feel of contemporary life. History strangely confusing, the mysteries of the present are not even intriguing - Kafka would die of boredom. And people's own passions swimming around them like sharks attacking them. And everything as decorous as a shop window. I think the play gets all this.The characters are immediately recognisable and their presence has consequence, they're not arbitrary..It's a strange play: it's like seeing an island of earth floating in the sky. As if the foundations of existence were exposed and as if the earth were trying to hide its nakedness."
Edward Bond

Canned Goods [1995]

Utah Blue [1995]

"It strikes you right through the heartI found the play unfussy, unsentimental, unapologetic and questioning in a way that really made me offer up Gary's philosophy - however odd it may be - to the temporal, real questionings of his brother Mikal and Nicol. What we get from the writer is great, expressionistic, bravura strokes"
Kaleidoscope on Radio 4

"The company launched its season with what can olnly be described as a baptism of fire - Dic Edwards' Utah Blue, a brooding, provocative play about the American murderer Gary Gilmore and his bizarre, interior world. It is a challenging piece"
The Independent

"Compelling it made for a provocative and harrowing two hours"
The Stage

"a brutal, emotional, gut wrenching couple of hours."
South Wales Argus

"The powerful imagery leaves you drained, wallowing in Gary Gilmore's hell, not caring what his heaven might hold"
Gair Rhydd

 

The Juniper Tree [1993 + 1995]

"Toovey and librettist Dic Edwards have given lively form to the Grimm tale about a step-mother who kills her step-son.vivid"
The Observer

"Dic Edwards' librettocarefully disentangles Grimm's fairytalecertainly a good first for Broomhill"
The Guardian

Several things were remarkablethe structure of the opera itself, (libretto by Dic Edwards) which kept a very tight hold on tension and momentum, and skilfully presented the different approaches possible to this mind-boggling tale. My favourite was an absurdist element strongle reminiscent of Ionesco's The Bald Prima Donna, where couples talk like elementary dialogue in an English language text book."
Opera Now

"The Juniper Tree presents impeccable credentials concerning its integrity as theatreDic Edwards' economical libretto kept up the tension of the original without indulging in wordiness."
Independent on Sunday.

 

The Beggars New Clothes, [1993]

"Dic Edwards has spiked his new lyrics with acid, the dialogue is funny.we listen to the words with relish. He can rhyme Schopenhauer with petit-bourgeois, which is pretty classy"
The Times

"This was theatre that had the audience enthralled"
Morning Star

"Pick of the week: Dic Edwards radical re-working of John Gay's Beggar's Opera is certainly a reason not to book yourself on the next Edinburgh (Festival) shuttleDrinks all round!"
What's On

"what a feast it turns out to be"
The Stage

" With a sharp new contemporary plot and witty lyrics from charlatan genius Dic Edwards, the show had a louche relaxed life that one could associate with its model far more easily than with some recent overdone attempts. Comparisons with Brecht/Weil were more appropriate here than for Lola Blau."
Theatre Record.

"Dic Edwards' stunning reworking of John Gay's 200 year old classicIn Dic Edwards' world the poor are as desperate as they are deserving and closer to the bestial for it. Nowhere has the world of dog eat dog been so shockingly and graphically illustrated."
Hampstead and Highgate Gazette

 

Wittgenstein's Daughter, [1993]

"Dic Edwards' challenging and enigmatic new play Edwards suggests that philosophical thought and cultural activities can indeed deprave and corrupt and that today's rampant nihilism and random vandalism flow from yesterday's draining of language of all ethical contentit is heady and intriguing stuff."
The Scotsman

"Better news over at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre where fine productions are running in two studios. Wittgenstein's Daughter is a new play by Dic Edwards in which a woman who believes herself to be the daughter of the moral philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, discovers that she was actually brought into the world by his colleagues as a cover for his homosexuality. Dic Edwards fires in unnusual directions to hit what I imagine he sees as the moral vacuum in contemporary society. Thanks to an intelligent interpretation here is a production that does justice to its theme."
The List

"Dic Edwards' play, Wittgenstein's Daughter is intellectually accessible, funny and provocative."
What's On

"Wittgenstein's Daughter tells the story of a French fascits's wife, Alma, who falsly supposes herself the philosopher's daughter and seeks out what remains of his past in Cambridge in the hope of refreshing her own value system before giving birth to her child. The development, involving a 100 year old disciple of Wittgenstein, a ghostly return of the man himself and an alarming flashback to the scene of conception with Alma playing her own mother, contains some comically sinister scene buildingTo come clean: Mr. Edwards is clearly a talent, but I haven't a clue what his play is about"
Irving Wardle in The Independent on Sunday

"There were moments (in this production) when the farcical presentation does combine powerfully with Edwards' clashing, discordant ideas, giving some idea of the potential of the play."
Time Out

 

CAST
Robert David Macdonald
Anne Marie Timony
Patrick Hannaway
Daniel Illeley

Casanova Undone, [1992]

"It's one of those delightful plays where you're sitting there and laughing uproariously at the wit of the language and then you suddenly understand that the themes themselves are very witty, very well thought out and very provocative. Because Edwards is looking very, very seriously at what constitutes revolution; he's looking very seriously at this whole mirage of reputation: what's an experience, what's an illusion. There's a lot of very meaty thought which is presented here to us as almost a bon bon. I think it's a play with tremendous resonanance and great fun."
Kaleidoscope, Radio 4

"This witty and compelling philosophical farce spotlights the degenerate rake, his potency on the wane in Paris during the Reign of The Terror. His erection, like the old order is flagging.a fine new play."
The Observer

"Dic Edwards might be embarrassed to have his work bracketed with Wedekind but he is a highly accomplished demolisher of myths with an ear for accomplished dialogue amd a mind for the aphorism: "Just because we have to lower our standards doesn't mean we have to live by them"Stimulating and provocative.
Plays and Players

"Dic Edwards is skilled at dismantling mythsit is a highly literate as well as witty play play with acute aphorisms and sharply tuned dialogue."
The Scotsman

"Casanova Undone is a beguiling play by Dic Edwards which alternates off-the-cuff philosophy with delicious dirty bits. The whole is a critique of sexuality and power which ultimately rejects the model of sex as a battle-ground where the combatants fight for the ultimate sensationas enjoyable as an ideologically sound Restoration Comedy."
Scotland on Sunday

"Dic Edwards has a gift for the telling phrase and an eye for the bizarre.Casanova Undone is rich with nicely turned lines and it revels in the byeways of sexual obsession. It's also a philosophical tease."
The Herald.

"Dic Edwards opens his sensational play with Casanova on his last legs.The writing is sanguine and sophisticated.intellectually zestful"
Time Out

"Much of Dic Edwards' play is a commdedia dell-arte-type farce in which the servant leads the master through a series of misadventures. But behind the farce lies a satire of vanity and an analysis of deception"
What's On

 

Regan [1991]

"Subtitled In The Great Society, it is a provocative, challenging work, about the nature of morality, liberal democracy, and freedom..It does not sound like the usual community theatre fare and it is not, and all the more welcome for that. It is strong meaty stuff.A stimulating piece of theatre"
The Guardian

"sombre and richly textured play. Regan enquires disturbingly into the nature of power over others."
The Stage.

CAST
Catrin Epworth
amd others

the fourth world, [1990]

"In this powerful drama a Colombian native tries to come to grips with the most laid back of British lifestyles while his hosts' channelled attitudes refuse to widen under growing cultural clashes."
The Chronicle

"the fourth world is a powerful, compelling drama about the confrontation between a young Colombian man and a middle-class British couple."
North Wales Weekly News

"Dick Edwards' intention is serious and complex. In Charles's arrogant, and Helen's fumblingly earnest assumptions about Gustavo's life amid the murder and corruption of Latin America, we see First World misunderstandings about the Third World blunder into real pain."
The Independent

 

CAST
Dominic Hingorani
Helen Gwyn
Nicholas Pritchard

Low People [1989]

"didn't stop me from admiring the performance of this powerful work. .It has all the elements necessary for a cry against society.If you look beneath the surface, there's some very deep stuff in this playif you like good, strong theatre you can't help but like this production."
The Stage

"David O' Shea directs a powerful.allegory."
The Guardian

 

CAST
Jack Elliott
Denise Stephenson

Doctor Of The Americas [1988]

Central School Speech and Drama, (Embassy Theatre Swiss Cottage, London) 1988

CAST
Jason Isaac
Arkie Whiteley
Jared Harries
and others

Little Yankee [1987]

Long To Rain Over Us [1987]

"Both in its well-attuned ear for unreason and its choice of targets - the murky, psychologically Romantic roots of nationalism; the insidious power of propaganda machines - the writing here is often distantly reminiscent of the work of the great Austrian satirist Karl Kraus."
The Independent

"The comedy in this is fresh and surprising. David O' Shea's direction draws the main story steadily into prominence above the author's firework display of other ideas. A fascinating evening."
The Times

"it's an intellectually stimulating play, and at times very funny indeed, with every national mannerism wickedly exploited in energetic, beautifully conceived performances from a distinguished cast."
The Guardian

 

Looking For The World [1986]

Sherman Theatre Company (Sherman Main Stage, Cardiff) 1986

"Dick Edwards is a new young writer who has much to offer, using his plays to draw analogies and discuss political issues, in a heady mixture of comedy and violence"
The Guardian

"its power is undoubtedly that time after time the audience is lulled into a false sense of security by the domestic comedy of Paddy and Sylvia.as the tension mounts amid scenes of sickening violence. Looking For The World takes on all the proportions of a Greek Tragedy"
South Wales Argus

"Looking For The World is a powerful piece of theatre, its message intruding deeper into the inner consciousness as the action continues."
Western Mail

 

CAST
Malya Wolf,
Mary Elan Ray
Hywel Evans
Pat Kane
Bill Manners

Canned Goods [1983]

"Powerful studies of tyranny"
South Wales Argus

"Once again, Dick Edwards demonstrates his talent for pointed observation and biting comment, his acute ear for the absurdities in inconsequential social chat
The Stage

 

At The End Of The Bay [1982]

"This play has burst onto a mostly moribund Cardiff Theatre scene like a breath of fresh air. It gloriously affirms the company's claim that there are new writers and new works around that deserve a showing."
The Guardian

"Dick Edwards gets right down to the witty, gritty street wisdom of Cardiff's old Tiger Bay to provide a work of remarkable quality and depth..With that strange moodiness of Tennessee Williams, he brings to his first full-length play to be produced, a haunting atmosphere of dying dreams and lost hopes."
South Wales Argus