“Pravda for Playboy”: David Edgar’s The Shape of the Table and the Eastern European Roundtables

Abstract

Abstract David Edgar’s The Shape of the Table (1990) is a near-contemporaneous dramatization of the process of regime concession and opposition conquest of power that characterised the negotiated transitions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. It is interesting in and of itself as an example of how one of the UK’s most notable socialist playwrights saw the varying elements of accommodation and confrontation in roundtable dialogues around 1989. However, it has further interest because in adopting an agent-centred, voluntaristic, and bargained conception of transition, Edgar reflected and anticipated the initial scholarly response to these processes. Similarly, Edgar anticipated problems of democratic disillusionment, economic liberalisation, and ethnonationalism as post-Communist Eastern Europe undertook the unprecedentedly complicated triple-track transition in economy and society as well as politics.