David Hare

Berlin/WallIn two contrasted readings for the stage, David Hare visits a place where a famous wall has come down; then another where a wall is going up.Berlin For his whole adult life, David Hare has been visiting the city which so many young people regard as the most exciting in Europe. But theres something in Berlins elusive character that makes him feel hes always missing the point. Now, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the reunification, he offers a meditation about Germanys restored capital - both what it represents in European history, and the peculiar part it has played in his own life.Wall The Israeli/Palestine security fence will one day stretch 486 miles, from one end of Israel to the other. It will be four times as long as the Berlin wall, and in places twice as high. In this second monologue, the playwright recalls his trips to both Israel and the Palestinian territory and offers a history of the walls building, an exploration of the philosophy behind it and a personal account of those who live on either side. Berlin premiered at the National Theatre, London, in February 2009 and Wall premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in March 2009.Of all British dramatists, Hare is the one who has always seemed to have the sharpest awareness of what is going on around him, which is what makes him such an eagerly sought-after journalist. Michael Billington

This play ran at the National Theatre, London, throughout 1978 and the New York production in the autumn of 1982 was equally well received. In counterpointing the experiences of an Englishwoman helping the French Resistance during the war with her life in the following twenty years, the author offers a unique view of postwar history, as well as making a powerful statement about changing values and the collapse of ideals embodied in a single life.Plenty is also a major film produced by Edward R. Pressman and Joseph Papp with Mark Seiler as Executive Producer, and directed by Fred Schepisi from a screenplay by David Hare. The cast, headed by double Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, includes Charles Dance, Tracy Ullman, John Gielgud, Sting, Ian McKellen and Sam Neill.

In 1991, before an election they did not expect to win, the Conservative government made a fateful decision to privatize the railways. As a result, the taxpayer subsidizes rail more lavishly then ever before. In The Permanent Way, David Hare, working with actors from the Out of Joint Company, tells the intricate, madcap story of a dream gone sour, by gathering together the first-hand accounts of those most intimately involved - from every level of the system. A drama that stirs indignation and pity in equal measure, political theatre that transcends the old conflicts between Right and Left to condemn the whole mindset and attitudes of those allegedly running our nations affairs. It is, by a mile, the most significant and revealing new play of the year. If you want to understand why Britain isnt working, you need to see The Permanent Way. Daily TelegraphA compelling, fast-moving and astringently witty collage of first-hand testimonies and conflicting points of view... The picture that emerges with great force from these vivid, eloquently juxtaposed vignettes is of a debased culture that sets less store by the expertise that comes from intimate knowledge of a subject than by vacuous so-called management skills. IndependentA vitally necessary piece of theatre. Guardian

It is 1979. Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her young daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend sets in train a series of events which only find their shape eighteen years later. A generational play about the long term struggle between a strong mother and her loving daughter, Amys View mixes love, death and the theatre in a way which is both heady and original.

An elderly antiquarian bookseller has just died at his home in the country. His two daughters come to attend to things. Isobel, who has been nursing him, is a partner in a small design firm. Marion is in politics - already a junior minister. It is Marions profession to provide answers, and to back those who offer solutions, but not all human situations yield to a professional approach - least of all when they involve their junior step-mother Katherine. In this elegantly constructed play, a mordant comedy of manners deepens into a painfully unsparing examination of the consequences of applying principled pragmatism to human feelings.David Hare has written one of the best English plays since the war and established himself as the finest British dramatist of his generation. John Peter, Sunday Times

Skylight premiered at the National Theatre in 1995 and then went on to become one of the most internationally successful plays of recent years. This is the definitive edition of Skylight.

A young lawyers 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 Hares 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.

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 Citys 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 Hares 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.

David Hares trilogy of plays - Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War - first presented at the National Theatre, London, in 1993, examines the crises facing three great British institutions - the Church, the Law and the Labour Party. In order to learn about these organisations, Hare amassed a body of hard research from first-hand interviews with many of the people involved: from vicars to high-ranking policemen, from judges to MPs. Asking Around presents a judicious selection of those interviews and also includes a commentary by Hare, describing how he threaded his way through the complex structures of Church, Law and Politics.

The leading British writer-director of his generation, David Hare is also one of the most productive. The last two years have seen the outstanding success of two stage plays, The Secret Rapture and Racing Demon, and the release of two films, Paris by Night and Strapless. The pieces collected here, written left-handed, form both a concealed professional autobiography and a lucid commentary on his work.

Stuff happens... And its untidy, and freedoms untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. The famous response of Donald Rumsfeld, American Secretary of Defense, to the looting of Baghdad, at a press conference on 11 April 2003, provides the title for a new play, specially written for the Olivier Theatre, about the extraordinary process leading up to the invasion of Iraq. How does the world settle its differences, now there is only one superpower? What happens to leaders risking their credibility with sceptical publics? From events which have dominated international headlines for the last two years David Hare has fashioned both a historical narrative and a human drama about the frustrations of power and the limits of diplomacy.Stuff Happens premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2004 season and has subsequently been performed around the world. In April 2006, it was given its New York premiere at the Public Theater in this new, slightly updated text.

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.

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.

My whole life, its been assumed, Western civilisation is an old bitch gone in the teeth. And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, theyre fighting for something they believe in.Via DolorosaIn 1997, after many invitations, the 50-year-old British playwright resolved finally to visit the 50-year-old State of Israel. The resulting play, written to be performed by the author himself, offers a meditation on an extraordinary trip to both Israel and the Palestinian territory, which leaves Hare questioning his own values as searchingly as the powerful beliefs of those he met. Accompanying Via Dolorosa is the 1996 lecture When Shall We Live?, which also addresses questions of art and faith. Originally given in Westminster Abbey as the Eric Symes Memorial Lecture, it attracted record correspondence when an abridged version was published in the Daily Telegraph.

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 lifetimes sustained thinking about art and politics. The foremost theatrical chronicler of contemporary British life.New York TimesOur best writer of contemporary drama.Sunday Times

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.

This is a new collection of some of David Hares finest work, including Skylight (Winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, 1996), Amys View, The Judas Kiss and My Zinc Bed.

I want to give my country a model of perfection... Nothing less. My country needs cheering up. Im the man to do it. Nobody can doubt John Christies passion nor his formidable will: his wooing of his opera singer wife has been marked by a determination befitting a man who won the Military Cross at the Battle of Loos. Now, in 1934, this Etonian science teachers admiration for the works of Wagner has led him to embark on an ambitious project: the construction of an Opera House on his estate in Sussex. But such is the scale of the enterprise that passion alone may not be enough. Its only when a famous violinist is delayed by fog overnight in Eastbourne that Christie hears word of a group of refugees for whom life in Germany is becoming impossible. Perhaps they can deliver Christies vision of the sublime - assuming theyre willing to cast his wife in the lead. David Hares new play is the story of an intense love affair between some unlikely bedfellows, and of the unrelenting search for artistic excellence in the face of searing scrutiny, sacrifice and war. The Moderate Soprano premieres at Hampstead Theatre, London, in October 2015.

Nothing is more important to a modern political party than fund-raising. But the values of the donors cant always coincide with the professed beliefs of the party. And family scandal within the cabinet has the potential to throw both the money-raisers and the money-spenders into chaos. This richly imagined ensemble play about British public life looks at the way business, media and politics are now intertwined to nobodys advantage, as, in an unforgiving world, one character after another passes through Gethsemane.Gethsemane, David Hares fourteenth original play for the National Theatre, London, premiered in November 2008.

This second volume of plays by David Hare contains work from the 1970s and 1980s which confirmed him as one of the major contemporary playwrights in the English language. It includes Fanshen, his remarkable 1975 play which focused on the Chinese Revolution with Brechtian subtlety, his screenplay for Saigon: Year of the Cat, The Secret Rapture, his biting portrait of a family in crisis, and the plays A Map of the World and The Bay at Nice. The collection is introduced by the author.