managing to hold their own during Jubilee week, both of which were at the Aldwych. One of them was about a mad king provoking a Civil War by dividing his kingdom between his daughters, and the other was Edgar's lightly veiled suggestion that Britain was exposed to a fascist takeover. The play was picketed by a group of neo-fascists waving union flags that echoed the patriotic bunting on the front of the theatre, and small scuffles broke out between these pickets and the emerging theatre audience. The play itself was an attempt to answer the question: How can a movement espousing the ideology that the UK had defied during the war gain purchase in postwar Britain? Destiny starts in India, on the day of independence, introducing four main characters whose lives intersect thirty years later in a small town in the English West Midlands. A British Colonel is a dying Conservative MP; a Major who is hoping to succeed him; a Sergeant who is a candidate for a far-right party and an Indian who works in a local foundry. During the election campaign a strike breaks out at the foundry and the "cosy English ritual" of a local by-election is transformed into a multi-cultural battleground which results in the fascists turning for protection and support to the forces they oppose. Edgar's comparison of British fascists with German Nazis was condemned as "dishonest" by Peter Jenkins in The Guardian, but the play won the John Whiting Award, presented by the Arts Council for new dramatic writing and was televised by the BBC as part of the Play for Today series in January 1978 with Frederick Treves as the Colonel, Nigel Hawthorne as the Major, Colin Jeavons as the Sergeant, and Saeed Jaffrey as Gurjeet Singh Khera. Nickleby and after After his greatest success in 1980 with The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company, an adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel Nicholas Nickleby, he resumed writing original plays which deal more overtly with political subjects. After the abandonment of the left by a number of public figures during the 1970s, Maydays (1983) deals with people's drift rightwards as they age. The play returned to The Other Place at the Royal Shakespeare Company in September 2018. Edgar wrote a trilogy of plays on the theme of negotiation set in Eastern Europe: The Shape of the Table (1990), written shortly