In this major retrospective study of the work of British playwright David Edgar, Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt combine the critical tools of theatre scholarship and political philosophy to delineate Edgar's extraordinarily prolific career, with special focus on his political writing and activities as a public intellectual. Singling out twelve published stage plays from more than thirty written between 1976 and 2008, the analysis is organized not chronologically but thematically, each chapter introduced with a nuanced explication of a contextualized model of political discourse relevant to a central preoccupation in each cluster of plays. Thus, in chapter four, Destiny (1976), Playing with Fire (2005) and Testing the Echo (2008) are discussed in relation to Edgar's treatment of the human and political consequences of the post-imperial challenge to notions of national and social organization by immigration and multiculturalism. The chapter begins with a consideration of the terms ethnos and dēmos to differentiate ‘the people’ as an imagined kinship community from ‘the people’ as a collective body of rights and decision-making. This synchronic approach does not mean that chronology is ignored, however; in fact, Edgar's personal history of engagement with democratic socialism runs like a red thread through his plays from the early 1970s agitprop of Marxist workers to the ideological failures of successive decades of parliamentary process. These ideas are given ‘fictionalized reality’ in scenarios of democratic complexity enacted by Edgar's characters. In chapter three, Maydays (1983), the ‘grand narrative’ of blighted socialist hopes written in the year of Margaret Thatcher's second electoral victory is compared to Continental Divide (2004). In these two even-handed plays, Republican and Democratic visions of the American dream founder amid the compromises necessitated by the realpolitik of state-governor elections.

If disillusionment is a leitmotif in the plays, so too is the playwright's determination ‘to keep on keeping on’ (p. 268). Often it is through resilient, complex female characters such as Brenda, the left-wing community member in Mary Barnes (1979); Floss, the NGO worker in The Prisoner's Dilemma (2001); or Alex, the embattled New Labour consultant in Playing with Fire, that vestiges of hope are retrieved from failure. Bolstering their argument with a discussion of Edgar's dramaturgical strategies, his reception in the UK and the USA, and his non-theatrical public writing, Reinelt and Hewitt refute suggestions that Edgar is primarily a wordsmith and rhetorician and, as such, now passé in the post-dramatic era. To the contrary, they declare that ‘the currency of politics is language’ (p. 230). As such, and by insisting that there can be ‘no one corresponding theatre style to suit the times’ (p. 8), the authors make a strong case for Edgar's continuing status as the leading political dramatist and commentator of his generation.