The first sign that all was not well came in the shape of table toppers Arsenal, who crushed Villa 4-0 at Villa Park, with Martin Keown scoring an own goal against his former club, "looking every inch the sad teenager who knew he'd left Arsenal's adolescent piss-up at the soft drinks stage," to quote Jon Spurling in All Guns Blazing.
Richard Eyre scheduled The Shape of the Table before it was fully written.
As Judith Hennessee wrote in her biography of Friedan, Bella and Bettyy were like the North Vietnamese and the Americans fighting over the shape of the table at the Paris Peace Conferences".
In 1990, I felt there was enough in common between events in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria to create a representative fictionalised narrative of the fall of east European communism (for my play The Shape of the Table).
He points out that The Shape of the Table followed a period of absence from theatre, in which he had been "writing a lot of television stuff that, as often happens in TV, didn't get made.
The Burning Coal Theatre Company's productions of David Edgar's Iron Curtain Trilogy – The Shape of the Table, Pentecost and The Prisoner's Dilemma – is being performed at the Cockpit Theatre from 13 to 30 November 2014.
Even if Jerome Davis's in-the-round staging cannot reproduce the baroque palace in which the action takes place, it precisely shows how the shape of the table mirrors the shifts in power.
The Iron Curtain Trilogy is typical of Edgar's work in that each play is driven by an image encapsulated in the title: the etiquette of a negotiating room in The Shape of the Table; various meanings of "speaking in tongues" in Pentecost; and a classic case study from psychological game theory for The Prisoner's Dilemma.
The Shape of the Table (1990), dramatising negotiations over the constitution of a post-communist democracy, was a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, commissioned, written and staged with unusual speed by the National to be premiered on the first anniversary of the desegregation of Berlin.
Some plays: 1970 Two Kinds of Angel; '72 Rent or Caught in the Act; '74 The Dunkirk Spirit; '76 Destiny; '78 The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs; '78 Mary Barnes; '80 The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; '83 Maydays; '87 That Summer; '90 The Shape of the Table; '94 Pentecost; '2001 The Prisoner's Dilemma; '03 Continental Divide.
