David Edgar was born into a theatre family and took up writing full time in 1972. In 1989, he founded Britain’s first graduate playwriting course, at the University of Birmingham, of which he was director for ten years. His stage adaptations include Albie Sachs’s Jail Diary, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (all for the Royal Shakespeare Company), Gitta Sereny’s biography of Albert Speer (National Theatre) and Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (Birmingham Repertory Theatre), as well as translations of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (Birmingham Repertory Theatre), Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario) and Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder (Chichester Festival Theatre). He has written two community plays for Dorchester: Entertaining Strangers and A Time to Keep (with Stephanie Dale). His revised version of Entertaining Strangers was presented at the National Theatre, as were The Shape of the Table and Playing with Fire. In addition to Maydays, his original plays for the RSC include Destiny, Pentecost, The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Written on the Heart. Other recent plays include Daughters of the Revolution and Mothers Against (Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Berkeley Repertory Theatre), Testing the Echo (Out of Joint) and If Only (Minerva Theatre, Chichester). He is the author of How Plays Work.