David Edgar’s award-winning play Maydays is updated for this September's Mischief Festival at The Other Place.

It's now 50 years since The Night of the Barricades in Paris (10-11 May 1968), when thousands of students protested and built barricades against the police, leading to hundreds of arrests and student and police hospitalised. It was also the year of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy’s assassination and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Edgar’s play tells the story of the idealistic young who came of age in 1968 and were drawn into revolutionary politics.

Maydays won the 1983 Plays and Players Best Play Award. It opens on May Day in England and America in 1945 and ends in the early 1980s, against a backdrop of the rise of Thatcherism.

Hand showing the V for Victory sign wrapped in barbed wired in front of a red and blue poster for Maydays
Poster for the original 1983 production of David Edgar's Maydays

The play tells the interlocking stories of a vicar’s son turned student radical, a young communist who becomes a Conservative ideologue, a single mother and political activist, and a Soviet army officer who ends up as a dissident.

Fiercely topical when first premiered, Maydays is now relevant again, in a new age of radical leftism and global politics providing startling parallels to the political revolution of the Millennial Generation.

Maydays will be staged as the Autumn Mischief Festival at The Other Place from 27 September to 20 October 2018, directed by Owen Horsley. Alongside Maydays, for three Performances only, Edgar will perform in an autobiographical one man show Trying It On, directed by Christopher Haydon.

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