It sounds like mission impossible. To celebrate this year’s 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the RSC set itself the task of mounting a play about the controversies surrounding the translation. A drama, therefore, entirely lacking in drama. No action or spectacle, no romance or comedy, no surprise twists or last-minute poisonings. Just people talking. And for David Edgar, who accepted the commission, this was part of the attraction. ‘A meeting between people who are unrelated but share a common purpose,’ he tells me, ‘can be as exciting and vivid and active as that great staple of drama, the family meal. Even sitting around writing a letter to a relative is a recognisable form of human behaviour.’
We meet in a break from rehearsals. He’s in his early 60s, lean and tall, with a literary stoop, and he dresses in the featureless costume of the left-wing lifer. Personally, his air is kindly, pensive, faintly monastic, and he speaks in lengthy, fluting screeds of rumination.
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