The aspiration to write a “state-of-the-nation” drama is the great white whale of political writing. Take the work of legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Exiled by Hitler to Scandinavia in 1933, he attempted to capture life in his homeland from anecdotes and verbatim accounts. The result, his state-of-the-nation play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938) distilled a whole society into the pattern of gestures in a dictatorship.
I won’t place myself in Brecht’s company, but writing my six-part radio drama Good People for the BBC over the last year has felt like the headlong pursuit of a moving target.
