David Hare: A Political and Personal Playwright
The life, work, and political outlook of playwright David Hare
Sir David Hare is one of Britain’s foremost dramatists. Onstage at Lantern Theater Company January 9 through February 16, 2020, The Vertical Hour is representative of Hare’s persistent examination of how the political and the personal intersect.
David Hare was born in 1947 in Sussex, England, and graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge University in 1968. The same year, he co-founded Portable Theatre Company to produce political work on the failings of British institutions. On its founding, David Hare said “We thought, wrongly, as it turned out, that England was in a state of apocalyptic crisis. And we didn’t believe that contemporary theatre dealt with that crisis… So we wanted to bundle into a van and go round the country performing short, nasty little plays which would alert an otherwise dormant population to this news.”
Hare acted in Portable Theatre Company productions, and soon wrote and produced his first play, Slag, for the company in 1970. By 1975, he had been resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre in London and at Nottingham Playhouse, written six plays, and co-founded Joint Stock Theatre Company — an experimental theater group based in company research that produced notable works such as Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine.
Hare has been a prolific and influential artist ever since. He has written or adapted nearly 40 plays, including Plenty, Skylight (seen here at the Lantern in 2008), The Blue Room, The Breath of Life (seen at the Lantern in 2010), and Stuff Happens. He has written 19 scripts for film, television, and radio, and his scripts for 2002’s The Hours and 2008’s The Reader each earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. He has a host of directing credits, published a memoir in 2015, and in 2011 won the PEN Pinter prize, awarded to a British writer of extraordinary merit. In 1998, he was knighted.
From his first days with Portable Theatre Company, a constant of Hare’s work has been the political and institutional failings of contemporary life, often inspired by his own on-the-ground experience. Absence of War examined political campaigns, drawing on Hare’s experience with Neil Kinnock’s failed bid for prime minister. Via Dolorosa was a one-man monologue about the Israel and Palestine conflict, written after visiting the region.
Some of his most stridently political work draws even more heavily on his capacity for copious research. 2009’s The Power of Yes explored the financial crisis of 2008, often quoting directly from the interviews of major financial players that Hare himself conducted. And 2004’s Stuff Happens is a sprawling history of the lead-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003, mixing verbatim quotes from the key players with Hare’s own extrapolations on behind-the-scenes encounters and giving all sides of the conflict a voice onstage.
This political bent is purposeful, and one the playwright embraces. “I’ve spent my whole life cooking spinach,” Hare told The Washington Post. “You know: Chinese revolution. Aid to the Third World. Privatization of the railways. And I’ve persuaded audiences that these subjects are just as entertaining as My Mother Didn’t Love Me, or My Father Was an Alcoholic.”
“David Hare has never lifted a pen for dishonorable purposes…He has continued to present the world to us as it unfolds in a conscientious, elegant, original, compassionate and hilarious way.” — Bill Nighy, actor and Hare’s frequent collaborator
The Vertical Hour was Hare’s next play after Stuff Happens, making the global machinations of the Iraq War and the related decisions and consequences intensely personal. This, too, is a hallmark of Hare’s work. His plays are populated by damaged idealists trying to find a way to live right in a world of broken and corrupt institutions, but they are never content to offer just one view — even if the playwright himself passionately holds one opinion.
Working to bridge the political left and right, or at least to locate the places where they overlap, is a core component of his work, and specifically of The Vertical Hour. As he told NPR in 2006, ahead of the play’s Broadway debut, “I was very interested in the position of the pro-war liberals. They had a very strong moral case for intervention. It was part of something that had been building up over the previous 10 or 15 years in Africa, in Yugoslavia, where a whole lot of well-intentioned liberals came to believe that the West had a moral duty to intervene when there was great deal of suffering. Although I was against the war, I could see that there was a virtuous case.”
Giving all sides a hearing is not just a political tactic in his plays, though; it is essential to crafting work that highlights contemporary issues through finely realized and deeply felt characters. As Hare told NPR, “It’s an approach to playwriting which I’ve had my whole life. When people say in that demeaning way…‘You’re a political playwright,’ it makes it sound as if that means that you write about politics all the time. But you don’t. You write with a certain view, and that view is that history affects human beings as much as biology. I’ve always written plays in which social forces and historical forces are blowing through the room and affecting how the people feel and think.”
This is passionate work, not dry political analysis or both-sides moral equivalency. Hare’s work, populated by those who want to help, those who want to exploit broken institutions, and those caught in the morass of contemporary life, aims to make a tangible difference in those lives and institutions. “You know, Beckett said that famous thing, the number of tears in the world is constant, meaning, whatever you do, there is such a thing called the human condition and it’s always the same,” Hare said to NPR. “I don’t believe that. I believe things are very different in one country to another and at one time and another, and you can actually relieve the number of tears in the world. And you can make them less and that the job of making them less is a noble job and something worth undertaking.”
The Vertical Hour is onstage at the Lantern January 9 through February 16, 2020. Visit our website for tickets and information.
