David Hare
Skylight by David Hare
Lyric Theatre, 1996
In an interview some years ago, David Hare said of his writing, “I try to make all my plays different, so that nobody can say they know what a David Hare play is going to be like.” Today he is numbered among the three or four best playwrights in the country, up there with Ayckbourn, Bennett, Pinter and Stoppard, but whereas the general perception of their themes and styles is fairly clear, Hare continues to perplex through his ability to defy easy classification.
He was born at Bexhill-on-Sea in 1947, the son of a naval commander, and enjoyed a “liberal, decadent and art-orientated” education at Lancing. After reading history at Jesus College, Cambridge, he spent a couple of years working for the Pathé Film Company which allowed him to indulge his two major passions, history and film.
Political from an early age – he had been forbidden to wear his CND badge while in the cadet corps at school – in 1969, with his friend and sometime collaborator Tony Bicât, he formed the Portable Theatre Company which took small-scale plays to audiences who couldn’t afford or weren’t interested in the anodyne middle-class fare offered by the legitimate theatre. His earliest plays for the company were consciously ‘agitprop’ (agitation and propaganda) in style, left-wing message drama, whose weaknesses he now self-deprecatingly puts down to the earnestness of youth: “Why aren’t they applauding? Oh, because it hits them so hard.” One night, playwright Howard Brenton came to Hare’s notice by dint of being the sole member of the audience. Some years and several collaborations later, they co-wrote the newspaper drama Pravda, which won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play in 1985.
However, Hare had already won his first Evening Standard Award fifteen years before. Slag, an acerbic black comedy set in a girls’ boarding school, was followed two years later by The Great Exhibition about a failed career MP. The author describes this latter work as a deliberate parody of the kind of plays the Royal Court was putting on at the time, and he should know as he had spent two years as resident dramatist there himself. Following a brief period at Nottingham Playhouse, in 1974 he helped form Joint Stock Theatre Company with Max Stafford-Clark and William Gaskill, for whom he wrote Fanshen, a controversial and explicitly political documentary adaptation of William Hinton’s novel about the Chinese revolution.
That same year, Hare’s play Knuckle took him into the West End for the first time. Written in the style of a Chandleresque thriller about graft in Guildford, it was not a major success, and neither was Teeth ’n’ Smiles the following year, a bitter comedy with music about a rock group performing at a Cambridge Summer Ball towards the fag-end of the sixties. But by the end of the decade Hare had hit his stride with Plenty, which was a resounding success on both sides of the Atlantic. Around the same time the TV film Licking Hitler, which similarly dealt with the activities of a group of British ‘black propagandists’ during and after the war, won the BAFTA Award for Best TV Play of the Year. Hare directed both. The idea of exploring similar themes in the two different media appeals to the playwright, and his latest exercise in complementary works for stage and screen has been The Secret Rapture and Paris by Night, both play and film respectively featuring as their heroine the kind of right-wing Tory woman thrown up by late-’80s politics.
His next project after the war plays spanned three continents. A Map of the World was first produced in Australia in the Adelaide Festival in 1982, then at the National Theatre in London, the following year, and finally at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1985, directed by the author each time. In 1986 he directed a pair of one-act plays, The Bay at Nice and Wrecked Eggs, again at the National.
This decade has brought him even greater success and recognition with a trilogy of dramas focusing in turn on three major British institutions: Racing Demon in 1989 looked at the Catholic Church in England; Murmuring Judges two years later dealt with the judiciary, and The Absence of War in 1993 took as its theme the failure of a Labour leader to win an early ’90s election. It was this last play that caused the most furore, not least among the Labour politicians who had allowed the playwright unprecedented access to their deliberations. Although Hare insists his main character George Jones is not drawn from life, the mud, perhaps inevitably, stuck. Hare in this instance almost perversely made a further rod for his own back by publishing Asking Around, a record of his research material.
In addition to these independently written dramas, David Hare has enjoyed success as a collaborator with Howard Brenton and others, and as an adaptor: The Rules of the Game (1971) was taken from Pirandello, and he has recently produced versions of two works by Brecht for the National Theatre, The Life of Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children. For television he has also written the films Dreams of Leaving (which he also directed), and Saigon: Year of the Cat for Thames in 1983. For the cinema he wrote and directed Wetherby, winner of the Golden Bear Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985, Strapless (1990), and he provided the screenplay for Louis Malle’s 1992 film Damage. He continues to work as a stage director of his own and other people’s product.
As for themes, lies and history are the two concerns that keep recurring throughout his plays; how the latter enshrines the former through habit, tradition, or, more sinisterly, politics. One character in Licking Hitler refers to “the thirty-year-old deep corrosive national habit of lying” which leads to “the steady impoverishment of people’s ideals, their loss of faith”. Perverting the truth may be done for good reasons in time of war, but when the habit becomes ingrained it is as dangerous as an infectious disease – significantly, after the war, the professional fabrications of the propaganda unit in Licking Hitler go on to jobs in the government and the media, thereby carrying their talent for disinformation into public life.
Hare feels there has been tremendous hostility to his work in some quarters because of the perceived judgemental stance of his plays. “My capacity for rubbing people up the wrong way seemed limitless,” he recalls now. “I did have to look at the technique of my playwriting, because I was not seeking to judge people. I was trying to dramatise dilemmas which I believed to be common.” Not that this hostility has completely dissipated, but his latest plays have surprised his earlier critics by their ability to encompass a wide range of characters. He shows interest in them all, and, if not sympathy, at least dramatic empathy with men and women whose views he does not necessarily share. “Why write about people unless they interest you?” he once said. “If I’ve ever appeared to dislike a central character, it’s only through failure of technique.”
Over the years, he has consciously refined that technique in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. These days his plays are no longer ‘just’ about politics, but wider issues besides. Skylight, for instance, impressed as many viewers as it touched by its powerful depiction of a modern love story – “a Brief Encounter for the ’90s” is how one admiring reviewer put it.
Not that the author himself has gone soft. While those who know him speak of his warm and generous nature, Peter Hall in his diaries talks of a “naturally paranoid, nervous and edgy” man, and Hare himself has always been ready to complain loudly to newspapers whenever articles about him contain errors, or “lies” as he calls them. He admits to being “absolutely hopeless at dealing with criticism”, and so feels a need to preserve what he can of himself, the man not the playwright. “I deliberately avoid writing about myself,” he once said, “my world, and my experiences.” On the other hand, he acknowledges that writing a play is one of the most extreme forms of self-revelation there is – “It is my soul on the stage” – so perhaps there is no paradox in the playwright seeking what protection he can beneath an outwardly prickly shell.
As Skylight opens on Broadway, there is no reason to suppose it will not be received there with the same level of enthusiasm that greeted its appearance in Britain. Speaking of an earlier visit to the USA, Hare summed up why he liked his job and, in particular, why he enjoyed being a playwright in Britain: “…an English playwright… works under the illusion that what he says may affect people’s lives. This may well be an illusion, but it hardly matters. For me it has been an essential illusion. Without it I would rather sell shoes.”