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When, in 2000, the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. Yet he was born in 1947 into an anonymous suburban street in Hastings. It is a world he believes to be as completely vanished as Victorian England.Now in his first panoramic work of memoir, ending as Margaret Thatcher comes to power in 1979, David Hare describes his childhood, his Anglo-Catholic education and his painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist. He sets the progress of his own life against the history of a time in which faith in hierarchy, deference, religion, the empire and finally politics all withered away. Only belief in private virtue remains.In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humour, David Hare explores how so radical a shift could have occurred, and how it is reflected in his own lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms - film and theatre. In The Blue Touch Paper David Hare describes a life of trial and error: both how he became a writer and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.This limited edition version of the book is signed and slipcased, with high specification production throughout. Just 100 available.
'There are times in the theatre when you suddenly find yourself in the grip of silence. There is no fidgeting or coughing, no shifting about in seats: the audience's attention is so tense it is almost palpable. This is because it is both thrilling and dangerous: a fight to the death, or the dawning of salvation. David Hare's new play, Skylight, is punctuated by such moments. They are the signs that a dramatist of the first rank is writing at full stretch, in complete command of his material, undogmatic and unafraid, unforgiving and compassionate.' Sunday Times Skylight was revived in a new production at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, in June 2014, which received the Evening Standard Revival of the Year Award.
For forty uninterrupted years, Robert Moses was the most powerful man in New York. Though never elected to office, he manipulated those who were through a mix of guile, charm and intimidation. Motivated at first by a determination to improve the lives of New York City's workers, he created parks, bridges and 627 miles of expressway to connect the people to the great outdoors. But in the 1950s, groups of citizens began to organize against his schemes and against the motor car, campaigning for a very different idea of what a city should be. David Hare's blazing account of a man - played by Ralph Fiennes - whose iron will exposed the weakness of democracy in the face of charismatic conviction, premieres at the Bridge Theatre, London, in March 2022.
Kyra is surprised to see the son of her former lover at her apartment in a London slum. He hopes she will reconcile with his distraught, now widowed, father. Tom, a restless, self-made restaurant and hotel tycoon, arrives later that evening, unaware of his son's visit. Kyra, who was his invaluable business associate and a close family friend until his wife discovered their affair, has since found a vocation teaching underprivileged children. Is the gap between them unbridgeable, or can they resurrect their relationship?1 woman, 2 men
Forming the first part of the David Hare Trilogy (which also comprises of Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War) Racing Demon focuses on the Church of England. A disparate body, the Church now finds itself attracting unwanted publicity, wracked by the dissension of its members on matters of doctrine and practice and at odds with the government. In this climate the Reverend Lionel Espy and his team of clergymen struggle to make sense of their mission in South London, as the arrival of a zealous young curate intensifies their personal and professional problems.3 women, 8 men
In David Hare's "greatest play" (City Limits) two sisters, Isobel, a serene and good person, and Marion, an ambitious Tory Junior Minister, gather at the home of their late father for his funeral. Katherine, the sisters' young, alcoholic, stepmother, announces her intention of joining Isobel's design company. Reluctantly Isobel agrees and this act paves the way for tragedy and disaster involving Isobel's lover Irwin, and Marion's evangelical, earnest husband Tom.4 women, 2 men
Covid-19 seems to be a sort of dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc. On the same day that the UK government finally made the first of two decisive interventions that led to a conspicuously late lockdown, David Hare contracted Covid-19. Nobody seemed to know much about it then, and many doctors are not altogether sure they know much more today. Suffering a pageant of apparently random symptoms, Hare recalls the delirium of his illness, which mixed with fear, dream, honest medicine and dishonest politics to create a monologue of furious urgency and power.
In vividly dramatic form, this play tells how a remote Chinese village comes to terms with Communism. Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese revolution created a whole new vocabulary in which a very important word is "fanshen" which literally means "to turn the body" or "to turn over." To hundreds of millions of landless and poor peasants it means to stand up, throw off the landlords' yoke, and gain land, stock, and houses. Moreover it means to enter a new world and this play is the story of how the peasants of Long Bow build a new world.2 women, 7 men
The Absence of War offers a meditation on the classic problems of leadership, and is the third part of a critically acclaimed trilogy of plays (Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges) about British institutions. Its unsparing portrait of a Labour Party torn between past principles and future prosperity, and of a deeply sympathetic leader doomed to failure, made the play hugely controversial and prophetic when it was first presented at the National Theatre, London, in 1993. The Absence of War is much more than a piece of skilled reporting. It is actually cast as a classic tragedy.' Guardian
Stuff happens... And it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.' The famous response of American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the looting of Baghdad at a press conference in 2003 provides the title for David Hare's play about the extraordinary process leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Stuff Happens premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2004 and has subsequently been performed around the world. 'Stuff Happens may make you openly boo, hiss, cheer or even cry, but it will also remind you why this 2,500 year-old art form remains the best way for human beings to collectively experience and contemplate the effects of war.' Los Angeles Times 'A totally compelling play that ruthlessly exposes the dubious premises on which the Iraq war was fought... One comes out enriched, informed and moved by Hare's ability to turn recent politics into historical drama.' Guardian
A young lawyer's involvement in her first case leads her through a criminal justice system - police, courts and prisons - which is cracking at the seams. Murmuring Judges is the second play in David Hare's highly acclaimed trilogy about British institutions. Racing Demon, which won four awards as Play of the Year in 1990, was the first part of the trilogy and examined the Church. The Absence of War, a play about the Labour Party, completed the trilogy.
Full Length, Drama Characters: 3 male, 2 female Unit Sets David Hare's new play The Vertical Hour is a thought-provoking exploration of how the political can sometimes intersect, collide with and ultimately dismantle the personal. While the play is positively brimming with cogent and fascinating arguments involving the current political situation, the production only fitfully succeeds in bringing this story to life. Hare fills The Vertical Hour with several of these ethical and philosophical quandaries that serve not only as dramatic interplay between the three main characters, but, also metaphorically as the basis for several of the arguments politicians and intellectuals are having these days concerning the role that America and the West have taken in Iraq, the Middle East and beyond.
1962: A public school on the South Downs. John Blakemore is a solitary boy who finds it impossible either to understand or adapt to the ways of the school. His adolescent earnestness put off teacher and pupil alike. And now suddenly he seems to be in danger of losing his only friend. David Hare's emotional new play, written at the invitation of the Rattigan estate as a response to The Browning Version, is a meditation on faith, learning and teenage friendship, played against the backdrop of a Britain still fighting to maintain an established rule. Collected with South Downs is the text of Hare's lecture Mere Fact, Mere Fiction, delivered to the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. In a famous defence of documentary theatre, the author celebrates the power of metaphor to transform factual quite as much as fictional material.
Arthur Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as "completely unprintable, " and indeed its premiere in 1921 spurred an obscenity suit. It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has reset these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day, with a cast of two actors playing a succession of characters whose sexual lives enmesh like a daisy chain. The Blue Room is a meditation on men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater. With deft insight about the gap between the sexes, The Blue Room takes the treacherous Freudian subject of projection and desire and reinvents it in a bittersweet landscape that is both eternal and completely up-to-date.
"If equal affection cannot be Let the more loving one be me." --W.H. Auden Oscar Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas has inspired contemporary writers for decades. In his heartbreaking account of love tested to destruction, David Hare presents his powerful interpretation of what may have happened behind closed doors between Wilde and Douglas. The Judas Kiss lays bare the drama of two critical moments in Wilde's last years: the day he decides to stay in England and face imprisonment, and the night after his release, two years later, when the lover for whom he risked and lost everything betrays him. With a quiet but burning sense of outrage, The Judas Kiss presents the consequences of taking an uncompromisingly moral position in a world defined by fear, expedience, and conformity.
What is a political playwright? Does theatre have any direct effect on society? Why choose to work in a medium which speaks to so few? Is theatre itself facing oblivion? All frequent questions addressed to David Hare over the last thirty-five years, as his work has taken him from the travelling fringe to the National Theatre, from seasons on Broadway to performances in prisons, church halls and on bare floors. Since 1978, Hare has sought uniquely to address these and other questions in occasional lectures given both in Britain and abroad. Now, for the first time, these lectures are collected together with some of his more recent prose pieces about God, Iraq, Israel/Palestine and the privatisation of the railways. Bringing to the lectern the same wit, insight and gift for the essential for which his plays are known, Hare presents the distilled result of a lifetime's sustained thinking about art and politics.
Russia, late summer at the close of the nineteenth century. Vanya and his niece Sonya have worked for years to manage the country estate. Into this ordered and regular household come two new visitors, Sonya's father, an irritable professor, and his young wife Elena who, in the space of a few months, cause chaos, one by their selfishness, and the other by their sexual allure. Between them, they manage to have most of the inhabitants questioning their purpose in life, their happiness and, at times, their sanity. David Hare's version of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya opens at Theatre Royal Bath in July 2019.
When, in 2000, the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. Yet he was born in 1947 into an anonymous suburban street in Hastings. It is a world he believes to be as completely vanished as Victorian England. Now in his first panoramic work of memoir, ending as Margaret Thatcher comes to power in 1979, David Hare describes his childhood, his Anglo-Catholic education and his painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist. He sets the progress of his own life against the history of a time in which faith in hierarchy, deference, religion, the empire and finally politics all withered away. Only belief in private virtue remains. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humour, David Hare explores how so radical a shift could have occurred, and how it is reflected in his own lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms - film and theatre. In The Blue Touch Paper David Hare describes a life of trial and error: both how he became a writer and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.
It's not just that rich people don't know what they've got. They don't even know what they throw away. India is beginning to prosper. But beyond the luxury hotels surrounding Mumbai airport is an obstacle, a makeshift slum. It's home to foul mouthed Zehrunisa and her garbage sorting son Abdul, entrepreneurs both. Sunil, twelve, picks plastic. Manju, schoolteacher, hopes to be the settlement's first woman to gain a degree. Asha, go-to woman, exploits every scam to become a first-class person. And Fatima, One Leg, is about to make an accusation that will destroy herself and shatter the neighbourhood. Katherine Boo spent three years under the flight-path, recording the lives of Annawadi's diverse inhabitants. Now from Boo's book, which won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2012, David Hare has fashioned an epic play for the stage which details the ingenious and sometimes violent ways in which the poor and disadvantaged negotiate with corruption to seek a handhold on capitalism's lowest rungs. David Hare's stage adaptation of Behind the Beautiful Forevers premiered at the National Theatre, London, in November 2014.
Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as 'completely unprintable'. The company that first presented them was prosecuted for obscenity in 1921. It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has re-set these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day. Using as much imaginative freedom in his turn as Ophuls did fifty years ago, and with just two actors playing all of the parts, Hare has created a fascinating landscape of dream and longing which seems both eternal and bang-up-to-date.
1905. Russia is at a turning point. Zakhar Bardin is from the landowning class, but is now the uneasy owner of a factory. His managing director is determined to face down militant workers on a point of principle. But the shutting of the business has tragic consequences for everyone concerned. Gorky's extraordinary play, which was written in exile and banned in his home country, presents a panoramic view of a restless society, with a bourgeoisie no longer sure of its own values, and a working class steadily facing up to the terrifying sacrifices ahead. Described by Ronald Bryden in the Observer in 1971 as 'a real discovery . . . the missing link between Chekhov and the Russian revolution', Enemies has a dramatic breadth, humour and ambition unique to Gorky. Maxim Gorky's Enemies is adapted by David Hare and premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in May 2006.
In 1997, the celebrated contemporary playwright David Hare adapted a little-known play called Ivanov, and in doing so revealed the young Chekhov as a markedly different writer from the one English-speaking audiences were familiar with. Now Hare has produced a streamlined new version of Chekhov's freshman drama Platonov, an abandoned seven-hour manuscript in which Chekhov recasts Don Juan as a Russian schoolmaster. Again, we encounter a great writer who is funnier, more exuberant, and more wildly romantic than anyone expected.
"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge."
After opening to sometimes bewildered reviews at the National Theatre in 1978, David Hare's wildly ambitious play Plenty established itself as a landmark modern classic in its 1982 New York production, which transferred to Broadway with Kate Nelligan playing Susan Traherne. Counterpointing the experiences of a fiercely intelligent Englishwoman flown into France as a secret agent during the Second World War with her life in the following twenty years, David Hare offers a unique view of post-war history, as well as making a powerful statement about changing values and the collapse of ideals embodied in a single life. 'The richest, certainly the most resonant experience of my theatrical year.' Clive Barnes, Sunday Times 'An explosive theatrical version of a world that was won and lost during and after World War II.' Frank Rich, New York Times Plenty was made into a film from a screenplay by David Hare with Meryl Streep, Charles Dance and John Gielgud. Plenty returned to The Public, New York, in October 2016 with Susan Traherne played by Rachel Weisz.
Nadia Blye is a young American war reporter turned academic who teaches Political Studies at Yale. A brief holiday with her boyfriend brings her into contact with a kind of Englishman whose culture and background is a surprise and a challenge, both to her and to her relationship. For thirty five years, David Hare has written plays which catch the flavour of our times, the interconnection between our secret motives and our public politics. Now, at last, he writes about an American, seeking to illustrate how life has subtly changed for so many people in the West in the new century. The Vertical Hour received its world premiere at the Music Box Theater, Broadway, on November 30, 2006, and received its UK premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 17 January 2008. |
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