The Berlin Wall was still being disassembled when David Edgar sat down to write about its aftermath. Between 1990 and 2001 he delivered three plays on the destiny of Eastern Europe, its transition to capitalism, shaky relationship with the West and search for a sovereign identity. No longer real-time deliberations, The Shape of the Table, Pentecost and The Prisoner’s Dilemma are now what Edgar refers to as ‘first draft history plays’ – prime material to reconsider the 25 years that saw former Eastern Block countries join the EU and East Berlin transform into everyone’s favourite corner of Europe.

Staged at the same time and by the same company for the first time, the three plays are coming to London all the way from North Carolina in just a few days. In preparation we talked to Edgar about the lure of Eastern Europe, the assumed death of political theatre and why he should most definitely not be allowed to make political predictions.

Run Riot: Can you tell us about your relationship with the Burning Coal Theatre Company? How did they come to stage the trilogy and what spurred their collaboration with The Cockpit?

David Edgar: This involves a confession. Sometimes, late at night, when the house is asleep, and maybe after I’ve had a drink or two, I sit at my computer and … google my own name. About eight years ago I discovered that there’d been a production of Pentecost – a play about art and culture in post-Berlin Wall Eastern Europe – by a small company with a funny name in North Carolina. I emailed them and liked what they said about the play, which they decided to revive to mark the tenth anniversary of the company’s founding. This time I saw the play, in a simple, clear and moving production. The director (Jerome Davies) asked me if there was anything else I might like him to do and I mentioned that I’d written two more plays about the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War, which (unlike Pentecost, which has been done all over North America) hadn’t been done in the States and he might like to consider. He then did The Prisoner’s Dilemma (about war and peace in an imaginary Balkan country) and finally the first of the three plays, The Shape of the Table (which is about the fall of an eastern European communist government in 1989 itself). Jerome then spotted that the 25^th anniversary was coming up, and asked if I’d mind if he revived all three in North Carolina and then brought them to London. We looked around for a theatre to take them to, and the Cockpit was keen to collaborate. So the plays, which weren’t written as a trilogy, are being done together for the first time.

Run Riot: The Shape of the Table opened a year after the Berlin Wall came down – it was written as history was happening, rather than with hindsight. What does this kind of immediacy bring to the theatre? Does it have any potential pitfalls?

David Edgar: The great thing about the first play was that it had an ending: it was about the overthrow of a government, drawing on what happened in five of the Eastern European communist satellites, a process which was over by the new year of 1990. So, unlike the Arab Spring, it was unlikely that I’d be overtaken by events. Of course, I’m not east European, and I’ve never lived in a communist country, so I might well have got the language or the politics wrong. But I had visited Hungary and Poland, and I boned up on communist jargon (never a “mistake”, always a “drawback” or a “shortcoming”). When the play was performed in Romania at the end of 1991, the husband of the translator (who had been Minister of Culture) told me I had an “East European soul”. I took that as a compliment.

Run Riot: When did you know you would be dedicating more than one play to Eastern Europe? What made the plays a trilogy and what made the trilogy finished?

David Edgar: In December 1990, while The Shape of the Table was running at the National Theatre, I visited Prague for the first time, and saw that churches that had been boarded up for 40 years were being restored, and I wondered whether something might be found behind the walls of such a church. Then I asked my hosts what they were most frightened of, and they didn’t say that price rises or losing their flat, but “seven million Russians moving west”. So that gave me the first act of Pentecost (about the discovery of a hitherto unknown artwork in an abandoned church) and the second act (when the church is invaded by asylum seekers). While I was writing Pentecost the Bosnian war was raging, and the peace process which brought it to a conclusion inspired the third play, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is about a civil war.

Run Riot: This is the first time the three plays have been staged by the same company at the same time, giving the audience a chance to reflect on a decade (or indeed 5) of European history in one go. How do you think this changes the experience of the plays?

David Edgar: The first thing to see is that the plays are free-standing and independent – they work perfectly well individually. However, I did find it fascinating seeing the three productions together in North Carolina in the summer: in the first play there are hints of the emergence of the far right in former communist countries: that theme re-emerges in Pentecost, in which the leader of such a party appears. Pentecost is partly about cultural interference by the west in the east; by The Prisoner’s Dilemma, that’s become threatened military intervention. I noticed that the canvas got wider across the three plays: the first two are set in one place, the third moves from California via Finland, Geneva and the Caucasus to a warship on the Mediterranean. The other big difference between them then and now is that then they were contemporary plays, now they’re history plays, albeit the first draft of history. Quite a few of the predictions made by the defeated communists have come true.

Run Riot: Your writing focused primarily on the UK after the trilogy – what prompted that shift?

David Edgar: I think the interesting question for me is why I spent so long abroad: I didn’t write a stage play set in contemporary Britain for 15 years. And that was odd because my generation of playwrights – Howard Brenton, David Hare – believed very strongly in writing about here and now. In the 90s we all moved on: Howard has been writing wonderful history plays, and I went back to the past too. But my big journey was in space rather than time, to a part of the world where the greatest drama of the latter twentieth century was happening.

Run Riot: The UK is not short on productions that tackle the current events head on – what’s the significance of theatre as a forum for analysing headlines and politics?

David Edgar: I sometimes think I’ve spent most of my life sitting on the same panel in the same black box theatre over the same pub debating the death of political theatre. It’s never died, and I don’t think it ever will. Britain has developed such a reputation for political work. There’s a terrific new generation of playwrights writing about what’s happening now and/or in the immediate past – including Lucy Kirkwood, James Graham, Jack Thorne, Lucy Prebble, Laura Wade, Mike Bartlett. If you imagine them growing older and the people they’ve influenced coming in to the profession, as happened in my generation, then political theatre will continue. Of course there’ve been great British political novels, movies and television dramas – but I think if you wanted a place to find the most consistent analysis of contemporary British public life over the last 60 years, it would be in plays.

Run Riot:  In 2013 your play If Only tackled the coalition and made quite a few accurate predictions: most recently we saw a bill aimed at the European Court of Human Rights. Any new predictions we should be wary of with another set of elections around the corner?

David Edgar: The second act of If Only was set in the summer that’s just passed, and imagines a Tory leadership desperately trying to outflank UKIP. In rehearsal in spring 2013, I had to keep changing the list of policies as the government announced them (even more so this year, when adapting the play for radio). So leaving the European Court, re-imposing curbs on Bulgarians and Romanians, ending subsidy for wind farms, introducing water cannon, stopping benefits for under 25s and banning the burka in public places have all (except perhaps the last) moved from the outer reaches of politics to the mainstream. As you say, I mustn’t write any more about what might happen between now and the 2015 election: it may give them ideas.

The Iron Curtain Trilogy

13 – 30 November

Cockpit Theatre