Hare David Hare Plays 3

Skylight; Amy's View; The Judas Kiss; My Zinc Bed
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30134-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 480 Seiten

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

David Hare has written over thirty stage plays and thirty screenplays for film and television. The plays include Plenty, Pravda (with Howard Brenton), The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy's View, The Blue Room, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, The Absence of War, The Judas Kiss, The Red Barn, The Moderate Soprano, I'm Not Running and Beat the Devil. For cinema, he has written The Hours, The Reader, Damage, Denial, Wetherby and The White Crow among others, while his television films include Licking Hitler, the Worricker Trilogy, Collateral and Roadkill. In a millennial poll of the greatest plays of the twentieth century, five of the top hundred were his.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hare, David

Leseproben

Introduction

Skylight?

Oh, the usual way – an image. A spluttering gas boiler on the wall, and a woman in a kind of voluntary exile, making life hard for herself. Very powerful, very evocative for me.

That’s right. Perhaps I finally opted for a play with walls because I was exhausted by writing three huge plays for the Olivier Theatre – and – and I was alive to the feeling that it’s hard to characterise with density in an epic play. Yes, plainly, in or Brecht brings off great central characters – two of the greatest in literature – but he’s careless, to say the least, in the way he flings minor characters on and off the stage. I was aware that my plays had become restless, always subject to the pressure of time, to the demands of narrative. Sometimes I was finding it easier to move on than to move in. In an epic play the scene you are writing is always waiting to be replaced by another. This creates a wonderful energy when properly done – the slate is wiped clean many times in the evening – but it can also mean that the people you create are not able to put down roots on the stage.

Skylight .

I couldn’t resist a little embellishment. Maybe it was shame at succumbing to the notion of writing a play in real time, so that’s why I give the play a little kick of context at the beginning and at the end with the appearance of the son, Edward.

Most certainly.

Not just a love story – I mean romantic in the proper sense, a play about people’s limitless potential.

I have no idea. Back in the 1980s, the critic of the Jack Tinker, claimed I was not a proper playwright because my plays had prospered only in the hothouse of subsidy. Put them in the harsher climate of the commercial theatre and they would die. To my surprise, as much as to his, he turned out to be wrong. Three of the plays in this collection were profitable hits on Broadway. However, they were written to exactly the same criteria as my previous work. There was no element of calculation. There never is. When you’re writing a play you have no sense of who it might appeal to. People certainly liked the spectacle of a big man flailing. And, again, three of these plays show big men flailing: Tom Sergeant, Oscar Wilde and Victor Quinn.

Obviously, the play is driven by the opposition between an entrepreneurial approach to life and an ethic founded in public service. Fortunately, this turned out to be an opposition which audiences understood. In Howard Brenton and I came up with a phrase, ‘the melancholy of business’. Tom Sergeant embodies that melancholy. I al ways find that the more a businessman tells you everything’s wonderful, the sadder you feel. Another phrase we might have come up with is ‘the melancholy of maleness’ – because Tom is a hopeless male, a man condemned to maleness, and all the ridiculous feelings that go with it. Also, I knew a little bit about restaurants, enough to know they represent capitalist endeavour at its most fleeting and heroic: every night you set out to prove yourself all over.

Interestingly, when we went to America with the play, we had imagined that audiences would identify with Tom’s get-up-and-go. To the contrary, we uncovered a massive well of anger to which the play spoke – the anger of those in public service who see themselves as overlooked and disregarded by all the callous priorities of the period. I had some modest feeling theatre was doing what it should.

Giving heart to the broken-hearted.

Yes. And there’s a reprehensible snobbery among those who claim to prefer one or the other in the role. I’m sometimes buttonholed by people who tell me they saw Bill, or they saw Michael, and how superior either one was. In fact, Bill has played so many times in my work that his version of ‘the big man’ couldn’t help but be fascinating. He was actually Gambon’s suggestion when we didn’t know how to replace him: ‘Get the handsome fellow to do it.’ But Gambon was also unforgettable. Lia Williams played Kyra, then Stella Gonet. Both superb.

Amy’s View

I was inspired by the collapse of Lloyd’s. It seemed so quintessentially English. Suddenly Squadron Leaders from Dorset, finding themselves swindled by the well-spoken crooks in the insurance business, were speaking the rhetoric of the most militant trade union leaders. Originally, people assumed the Thatcherite revolution was there to clear away the riff-raff, but now, like all revolutions, it was turning on its own supporters. A certain generation had believed itself entitled to money without having to work for it. There was an expectation that money was like yeast – it would just regenerate itself, and that the less you thought about it, the more morally worthy you were to receive it. And that particular sense of entitlement was deeply embedded in class – as was the kind of light comedy in which Esme Allen had made her name and prospered. I loved using the theatre as a metaphor for life.

To a degree.

I’d chosen a four-act structure, which is a demanding and interesting form, very rarely used nowadays, also devilishly difficult to bring off. What you don’t show has to be as convincing as what you do – because what has happened between the acts is what gives the action on stage its undertow and power. Unfortunately a few critics couldn’t see past Judi Dench’s performance as Esme. One idiot even managed to suggest that she was writing her own lines – in one sense, you could say, a tribute to Judi’s perfect mastery of the role, but in another, a rather revealing display of the critic’s ignorance of the working practices of the modern theatre.

This happens a lot.

It seems to take critics ten years before they trust me.

It’s not for me to say. The weakest part of the play concerned the young man, Dominic. I often struggle with young men. I find them difficult, in life and on the stage. By the time we took the play from the West End to Broadway, then the Shavian ding-dong in the second act had been sharpened up and Dominic was better drawn. I hate all the clichés of theatre criticism: that a playwright has to love all his characters. Why? Does Shakespeare love Iago? Critics also like to claim that a good play is always evenhanded. Is that really true? I can think of a series of belting plays, incendiary plays which are completely one-sided. Would be more powerful if it gave the Nazis better arguments? I don’t think so.

Amy’s View

Yes, I wrote it at a moment when the theatre-is-dead movement was at its most smug. Clearly, it’s unfortunate that only a certain number of people can see and hear a single play at any one time. Does that make it elitist? Six billion are shut out and eight hundred admitted. What can you do?

Absolutely not. It glowed, because of her. When Judi read the play, she had no idea why the director Richard Eyre so wanted her to play the part. But as she herself says, it’s in those very plays to which she doesn’t immediately respond that she eventually does her greatest work. For her kind of talent, if things come too easily, they’re not as good. Judi had a terrible struggle – often in tears, often in despair – but the mark of the struggle was in the stature of the performance.

Yes. Actually, Mike Nichols had asked me to write a film. He thought the modern cinema was ready for a more honest account of the trial than had been possible in the days of Peter Finch or Robert Morley. By chance, I’d studied Wilde at Cambridge because I believed him to be a far more original thinker than was then credited. My tutor responded by telling me that if I made Wilde the subject of my special paper, I would be a laughing stock. Wilde was not a serious writer. I went ahead in the face of his advice. When that tutor himself wrote a play about Wilde which was produced at Hampstead Theatre some years later, I did allow myself a quiet smile. Anyway, I wrote the screenplay, but Mike didn’t like it – not witty enough, he felt. Again, it was Nichols who said, ‘I think it’s a play. You should just do the bit where he’s in...