It’s been 30 years since Eric Bogosian’s acerbic play Talk Radio premiered in New York. Stewart Lee directed it at the Edinburgh festival in 2006 and Liev Schreiber starred in an acclaimed Broadway production the following year but, returning this month, it seems more pertinent than ever.

When Bogosian wrote Talk Radio, the media landscape was strikingly different. With the world not yet online, public opinion in America could be shaped and inflamed over the airwaves by figures similar to the show’s brilliant and monstrous anti-hero, the hell-for-leather shock jock Barry Champlain. Over the course of the play, which unfolds in real time during one edition of Barry’s call-in programme, he taunts, provokes and antagonises callers of every political persuasion. A woman pontificating about the dangers of drugs is lectured by him on the CIA’s role in the narcotics trade, a 16-year-old is berated for falling pregnant and an African-American man who praises the show is accused of being an Uncle Tom. What’s dangerous about Barry is not his beliefs but his lack of them; he’s the king of the trolls.

“Talk radio was a very big deal in the States in the 1980s,” explains Bogosian, 64, down the line from New York. “The right then took it over, which wasn’t the case at the time. I was looking at someone who will pretty much say anything to get a rise out of his audience, which in turn increases his ratings. Look at Rush Limbaugh. He has described himself as an entertainer. At the same time, he’s messing with issues which are of the greatest importance to all of us. You’ve had a similar problem with Brexit: someone starts tossing this football around for fun and before you know it, they’ve changed policy.”

Bogosian, right, with Paul Giamatti in Billions. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

He gives an appalled laugh. “There was never really any dialogue on talk radio. It was about turning issues into cannon fodder for entertainment, which is exactly how we’ve inherited this moron who is now our president. People get confused about what’s real and what isn’t when you have this pundit who’s pushing all kinds of opinions and jerking us around. We have this president, you have Brexit and I’m not sure either of those things happened because anyone was being serious. What this has to do with the play is that at its centre is an ego, someone who wants to get his own little chess piece pushed across the board.”



Though Barry looks now like an architect of the Trump era, he started out as something altogether more punk. When Bogosian first thought about the play in the early 1980s, his initial inspiration was John Belushi, the kamikaze Saturday Night Live comic who died of a drugs overdose in 1982 at the age of 33. “Belushi was breaking bottles over his head, taking heroin, the next thing he’s dead. It made me look at my own situation and ask: What would I be willing to do to get my audience to be larger? I played the Batcave in Soho or squats in Amsterdam where I’d be as obnoxious as possible but I was, like, ‘Where is this leading?’ When I found Barry, I hit paydirt.”



Bogosian emerged as a performance artist from the New York punk scene in the late 1970s. “I was with the guys who wore black and shoved,” he says. In celebrated collections of scalding monologues such as Drinking in America, and Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, he portrayed marginalised, corrupt or confrontational characters, from a neo-Nazi TV evangelist and a death row prisoner to a CIA operative advising on torture methods and a homeless man urinating in a subway train. (Many of these are collected together in a new Kickstarter-funded online video project, 100 Monologues, with each one performed by a different actor, including Winona Ryder, Peter Dinklage and Ethan Hawke.) His performance style was electrified and provocative; he would even pick fights with audience members while in character. “Not very successfully,” he points out when I bring it up. “Harassing the audience wasn’t really my forte. My forte was staying on stage and playing characters.”



‘I was with the guys who wore black and shoved’ … Eric Bogosian. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

He was at the centre of a notorious incident at the Edinburgh fringe in the early 1980s, when the late Malcolm Hardee, who was performing in an adjacent tent, stormed Bogosian’s show with his own audience in tow to object about the noise. “Malcolm led the parade, nude, on a riding mower, into my theatre, and right across my stage,” he recalls. “I blew my stack, which is just what he wanted. Someone stopped me from taking a swing. Later, I tried to wreck my dressing room. I was livid. I took my show very seriously. We were coming from very different places, as far as performance went. Today, I see the humour in it. And I understand now that poor old Malcolm was a prankster. He got me good. I think he was right to do what he did. And I was right to do what I did. We’re all right.”



It was Talk Radio that changed Bogosian’s life, bringing him back to multi-character plays after years of monologues, channelling the rising tide of anger brewing in the US media and making him a star in the process. He played Barry in both the original production and Oliver Stone’s even darker 1988 film. (It ends, unlike the play, with Barry being gunned down by one of his listeners – which is what really happened in 1984 to the Denver DJ Alan Berg, another of the show’s inspirations.) In 1996, Richard Linklater filmed Bogosian’s play subUrbia, about a group of alienated teens mooching around their neighbourhood convenience store, though by this time the playwright’s parallel life as a screen heavy was already under way. It was startling to see him as the villain in the Steven Seagal thriller Under Siege 2, telling his hostages: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captor speaking. In the event of an emergency, it may be necessary to kill you.”



The film roles kept coming, everything from Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry to Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, though modern audiences are likely to know him from scene-stealing turns in hit series such as Billions, starring Damian Lewis, and Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down. “We get paid less,” he says of the current TV revolution, “but everyone is working. Whether all of this leads to a more ‘radical’ message I don’t know. Still, if there is going to be more interesting work, it will be made during times of expansion and flux, like right now. And I love that.”

