David Hare

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oscar Wildes philosophy leads him on a path to destruction. The Judas Kiss describes two pivotal moments: the day Wilde decides to stay in England and face imprisonment, and the night when the lover for whom he risked everything betrays him. With a burning sense of outrage, David Hare presents the consequences of an uncompromisingly moral position in a world defined by fear and conformity. Originally produced in the West End and on Broadway, this new edition coincides with a 2012 revival.Superbly written... Hare has taken a history and pieced it together with heroic grace... Vastly rich, sophisticated and heartbreaking.Time Out, New York

Should I run? This is the question Pauline Gibson is asking herself. She has spent her adult life as a doctor, the inspiring leader of a campaign for local health provision. When she crosses paths with her old boyfriend, Jack Gould, who has made his way in Labour party politics, shes faced with an agonising decision. Whats involved in sacrificing your private life and your peace of mind for something more than a single issue? Does she dare? David Hare was recently described by the Washington Post as the premiere political dramatist writing in English. His explosive new play portrays the history of a twenty year intimate friendship and its public repercussions. David Hares new play Im not Running, premieres at the National Theatre, London, in October 2018.

From his early days as a playwright, David Hare has moved deliberately between stage, film and television, over the years building up a repertoire of work, most of which seeks to capture the changing feelings of contemporary life. Now, for the first time, some of Hares best, and most characteristic, screenplays are collected together in a single volume, confirming his status as one of Britains most passionate and versatile writers of fiction. This volume also contains an illuminating introduction by the author.

This first volume of David Hares plays contains his work from the 1970s, including his landmark play of that decade, Plenty, charting the development of one of the great post-war British playwrights (Independent on Sunday). The volume also includes the plays Slag, Teeth n Smiles, Knuckle and Licking Hitler, and is introduced by the author.

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 Hares 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 Hares 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.

On 15 September 2008, capitalism came to a grinding halt. As sub-prime mortgages and toxic securities continued to dominate the headlines well into 2009, this spring the National Theatre asked David Hare to write an urgent and immediate work to be staged this autumn that sought to find out what had happened, and why.Capitalism works when greed and fear are in the correct balance. This time they got out of balance. Too much greed, not enough fear. Meeting with many of the key players from the financial world, David Hare, author of The Permanent Way and Stuff Happens, has created The Power of Yes: a compelling narrative, as enlightening as it is entertaining.Its like a ship which youre being told is in apple-pie order, the decks are cleaned, the metal is burnished, the only thing nobody mentions, its being driven at full speed towards an iceberg. Not so much a play as a jaw-dropping account of how, as the banks went bust, capitalism was replaced by a socialism that bailed out the rich alone.The Power of Yes opened at the National Theatre, London, in September 2009.

In 1997 the 50-year-old playwright David Hare decided to visit the 50-year-old state of Israel and write a play - Via Dolorosa - about the conflict. He then chose to become the actor of his own play and set about learning to act the monologue for an uninterrupted 95 minutes on stage. Acting Up is a diary of the ups and downs of that learning curve as well as an insight into what it is actors, directors, producers and stage staff actually do in rehearsals. Hares hilarious diary of his experience on both sides of the Atlantic tells of his difficulties in coming to terms with his terrifying change of career, but also grapples with more serious questions about the nature of acting itself.

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

How do you fight without hate?Racing Demon reveals the struggle of four clergymen to make sense of their mission. David Hares play opened at the National Theatre, London, in 1990 to universal acclaim, and won four awards as Play of the Year. Racing Demon was the first part of David Hares trilogy of plays about British institutions; Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War completed the trilogy.

The great detective writer George Simenon escaped France at the end of World War Two, and arrived in the USA to start again. With his American wife, he settled at Shadow Rock Farm in Lakeville. Years later, he wrote La Main, a psychological thriller set in a New England farmhouse. David Hare has taken this novel and forged from it a startling new play.

David Hares play, My Zinc Bed, continues the run of work in which he has sought to describe the atmosphere of contemporary Britain. A successful entrepreneur, Victor Quinn, employs a young poet, Paul Peplow, to decorate the legend of his fast-growing Internet business. Nothing prepares either man for an outcome which makes for a compelling story of romance and addiction.

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.