The haranguing of David Edgar – by his 20-year-old self

What happened to the Sgt Pepper generation? That’s one of many questions posed by David Edgar in Trying It On, an unusual and stimulating play that he occasionally performs with the assistance of Danielle Phillips. I caught the last of its current batch of performances at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, but I suspect there is still more life in this mix of rigorous self-inquisition and exploration of the failed hopes and dreams of the 1960s.

The first striking thing is the honesty of the piece. The 70-year-old Edgar imagines a confrontation with his 20-year-old self when he was a political activist at Manchester University. The impatient young socialist wants to know precisely what the comfortably established playwright has achieved. But Edgar also looks beyond his own personal odyssey: he includes interviews with a host of people, including Anna Coote, Hilary Wainwright, Paul Mason and Tariq Ali, all offering their testimony about the successes and failures of the last 50 years.

Edgar even, to borrow a phrase of Howard Brenton’s, disrupts the spectacle by getting the hitherto quiescent Phillips to rise up from operating the autocue and attack him for his self-regarding male supremacy.

Many dramatists – including Edgar himself in Maydays and Trevor Griffiths in the scandalously neglected The Party – have previously explored the failure, and even the impossibility, of revolutionary socialism in Britain. What makes this show radically different is its element of unextinguished hope. Edgar readily acknowledges that the hours he and others spent printing subversive leaflets left capitalism unthreatened and sees the presumption of white, middle-class students adopting James Baldwin’s rallying cry of “The Fire Next Time”.

But Edgar also recognises that the fervent socialism of the 60s is now channelled into a host of disparate movements including feminism, racial equality and environmental issues. Idealism, Edgar suggests, is not dead. It has simply changed its focus and tactics.

Students of drama will also be intrigued by the form Edgar has chosen. Quite simply, he demonstrates that a play can now be whatever its author wants it to be. In this case, that includes straw polls of the audience (a number of whom, the night I went, voted for Brexit, but only one of whom admitted to voting Tory) as well as social inquiry, anecdotal reminiscence and internal debate. You come out not only admiring Edgar for his confessional courage but also for his realisation that the hunger for change is still alive and perfectly compatible with our current concern with identity.

As Edgar himself puts it, in a resonant phrase that captures his undimmed optimism: “Politics extends outwards to the planet and inwards to the personality.”