party has a blank round, and since no member knows who this is none of them need assume responsibility for the killing. Edgar and his friends tried to write in a style as similar to the others as possible so none of them need take responsibility for his contribution to the play. The result was England's Ireland (1972), an episodic look at the history of the British in Northern Ireland with different episodes shown from different perspectives. This received its world premiere in 1972 at the hands of the Shoot Theatre Company at the Mickery Theatre, Amsterdam, and later the same year transferred to the Round House Theatre in London. By now, Edgar was receiving commissions from repertory theatres and small touring groups resulting in Excuses Excuses (1972) for the Belgrade Theatre Studio, Coventry and later revived by OpenSpace Theatre, London in 1973 and then revived as Fired (1975) by Second City Theatre Company was a debate on the motives for arson committed in protest at redundancies at a local factory; Rent or Caught in the Act (1972), at the Unity Theatre, London was about housing conditions for the working classes (and this was also produced at a community centre in Battersea at the request of the Wandsworth Community Workshop led by the Tenants Union, as part of the campaign in 1971–72 against the Housing Finance Bill, eventually enacted as the Housing Finance Act 1972); Road to Hanoi (1972) produced on tour by Paradise Foundry Theatre Company, London, was a ten-minute play written with Howard, Wandor and Snoo Wilson about Bob Hope's 1971 visit to Hanoi to attempt to buy back American POWs; In 1972, Edgar decided to put the journalism to one side and took to being a playwright full-time. Gaining a reputation Lunchtime theatre is an avant-garde phenomenon that seems to exist on the fringe of the fringe and whose popularity waxes and wanes but never disappears. One series in Glasgow was scheduled for a dozen plays, but proved so popular they eventually had over a hundred. In London in the 1970s it had something of a renaissance at the Orange Tree Theatre, at the Croydon Warehouse where it proved so popular they didn't bother putting on evening performances for a while, and at a gays-only lunchtime theatre club called Ambience (from which developed London's Gay Sweatshop). The Soho Polytechnic was another lunchtime theatre venue where Edgar put