David Hare

My Zinc Bed (ara El meu llit de zinc en la traducció catalana) presenta un triangle complex i, a estones, d’una considerable turbulència: amb l’eix temàtic de la dependència (entesa en el sentit més

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

David Hares great quality has always been his refusal to accept the division between fact and imagination. His creative invention is fired by public realities and in turn he makes those realities feel deeply personal. That same quality is wonderfully at work in his essays and poems. Whether he is writing about Tony Blair or Joan Didion, whether he is writing out of love or rage, evoking the intimate moments of his own life or the great moral questions of our times, he brings his subjects to life with an irresistible immediacy. All the wit, combativeness, energy and edge he has brought to the stage are present here on the page. Fintan OTooleI cant remember if I had any plans for the twenty-first century. I was already 52 when it arrived. But events raced off in such unexpected directions that any possible ideas must have gone out the window. Many of us shared the sensation that history was speeding up.Recording dizzying changes in culture and politics, these elegant essays range in subject from the photographer Lee Miller to the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the actress Sarah Bernhardt to the rapist Jimmy Saville, from a celebration of Mad Men to a diagnosis of the incoherence of Conservatism in the new century. The poems, in contrast, are private: tender meditations, filled with love, memory, vulnerability and the melancholy of ageing.This is a powerful compilation of prose and poetry by one of the distinctive thinkers of our time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.