Hare Obedience, Struggle and Revolt

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30095-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

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 lifetime's sustained thinking about art and politics. 'The foremost theatrical chronicler of contemporary British life.' New York Times 'Our best writer of contemporary drama.' Sunday Times

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

Obedience, Struggle & Revolt

It’s a peculiar thrill to be asked to give the second John Sumner lecture here in Melbourne. Most of you will be too young to understand that, for anyone of my age, our idea of your city was entirely shaped by the film of Neville Shute’s novel The film appeared to recommend Melbourne on the interesting grounds that nuclear holocaust, like everything else, will arrive in Victoria three months late. Who can forget those familiar Melbourne residents, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire – three natural-born Australians to the life – picking their way among the ponies and traps? Even in the late 1950s, Anthony Perkins was already having to deal with the incipient rebelliousness of the Australian female, which will one day make her a global by-word for wilful independence. Typically intransigent, the poor dear is refusing to take her suicide pill. ‘I love you, I love you,’ Perkins keeps saying, trying to push the damn thing down her throat. Oh yes, we got a very clear vision of what life in Melbourne was like.

In fact, my father had already told me a little. Dad had run away from school and from a family of bank managers in Ilford, Essex, first to be a jackeroo in New South Wales, and then to blow the cornet on a merchant ship. By the time of my birth, he had survived some hair-raising times in Atlantic convoys to become a purser with the P&O, taking out generations of colonial layabouts and cricketers on the last remaining islands of nineteenth-century British snobbery, for leisured journeys halfway across the world: deck quoits and dressing for dinner. There were eight chefs from Goa just to cook curry, and before Dad could reach down for his shoes, his servant Fernandez would already be on his knees to unlace them. We barely saw him until he was sixty. But we could tell from the generalised good humour with which Dad breezed back home, sun-tanned and carrying a thick roll of cash tied with a rubber band – a contrast, there, with our own style of life – that Australia was fun and that Bexhill, Sussex, was very definitely not.

And so indeed it proved on my own first visit. At the end of 1980, Jim Sharman got me to fly out so we could plan my half of a twin pair of plays which Sam Shepard and I were meant to write for the 1982 Adelaide Festival. It was a time at which I had despaired of ever writing a play again. I wanted to give myself a fright by abandoning my own protocol and accepting what remains only the second theatre commission of my life. I reckoned, in a cowardly way, that if I fell flat on my face, then I would at least fail twelve thousand miles away from the place where I lived. The newspapers reporting my humiliation would blow away down gutters far from my own. But nothing in my calculations prepared me for the blast of energy and high spirits which would send my mind spinning. Retiring for Christmas to a farm in Cooma with a distinguished relative from Canberra who was, at the time, to the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, I remarked how overwhelmed I had been by Sydney. Apart from anything else, in 1980, it was the most overtly and extravagantly gay city I had ever visited. ‘Gay?’ he said. ‘What do you mean, gay?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘homosexual.’ ‘Homosexual?’ he said. ‘Sydney?’ Then, after a moment’s thought: ‘I must tell the Prime Minister about this.’

It’s important to stress that there was never a trace of condescension in my resolve to use Australia as a promising place in which to try and unblock myself. On the contrary. My play had been finished in 1978 and produced the same year at the National Theatre in London, with a commanding performance by Kate Nelligan, to a less than welcoming reaction from the British theatre critics. Bernard Levin, the excitable reviewer for the had been moved to observe that he wished David Hare would just go away. Something in that phrase powerfully evokes the flavour of those days. Theatre seemed extraordinarily important. It aroused very strong feelings. We argued over it as if it were life itself. As a sceptical socialist whose youthful world view had been shaped by the Vietnam War abroad and by the corresponding failure of Harold Wilson’s Labour governments at home, I had reached a moment when I had little idea where either I or the world were heading. I was lost. was an epic of post-war disillusionment, the story of a young SOE agent flown into France in the 1940s, only later to become trapped in a backward-looking memory of courage from which, among the shabby accommodations of peace, she cannot escape. Ten years in the theatre had ended with my writing a play which dramatised the frustrations of someone who could not, however hard they tried, come to terms with a national loss of ideals. Fifteen years of being politically sentient had left the play’s author with the definite foreboding that whatever tricks Western history now had up its sleeve, they were unlikely to be to his taste.

So, to be clear, I did not accept the job in Adelaide because I imagined the place to be some sort of plastic kiddy-slope on which I could once again pick up my skis. I wasn’t stupid. The first lesson of theatre was already plain: there is no such thing as an unimportant performance. To this day, I defy any writer or actor to watch the lights lower on any audience anywhere and not feel a cold hand twisting somewhere inside their bowels. I remember once walking onto a stage for a one-night charity performance and seeing the marks down the back of Michael Gambon’s shirt: a shapely dark continent of sweat which corresponded to the rivers running down my own. ‘Oh yes’, Michael said, ‘that never goes away.’ (‘Get through the door,’ he advised. ‘Close the door without fumbling. Say the first line correctly. Then say the next. Go on from there.’) No, I agreed to write – for that was the name of the eventual play – solely and simply because I felt that if I did not write it now and for this place, I would never write again. It was, in my mind, as scary and dramatic as that. On the first night in Adelaide I entered the foyer to encounter the disturbing sight of the dramatic critics of the London and the London freshly belched out of a Qantas jumbo. They were talking contentedly together – grazing, really – as if their presence so far from their native killing fields were the most normal thing in the world. My illusion of freedom had been exactly that – an illusion. Lesson Two: in this business your enemies will follow you to the end of the earth.

You may, at this distance, find it hard to credit the measure of passion which moved us all and which marked out the ferocious theatrical arguments in the Britain of the 1970s. You might say, ‘These were only plays, after all.’ You might even notice that some of the hotly disputed titles which broke friendships and threatened theatres, which led to denunciations, rancour and lifelong accusations of betrayal, are those which have since been most completely forgotten. And yet, even so, it’s impossible to think back to the years of my apprenticeship, both on the fringe and at the nascent National Theatre, without feeling afresh the vehemence, the violence, the almost impossibly strong convictions which led to a crazy heightening of language – ‘Just go away!’ – and to a near-hysterical sense of the importance of art which I have occasionally to remind myself is not a historical phenomenon.

These feelings came back to me recently when sitting at the cinema watching the film . Few, sadly, will want to contradict me – unless of course the film-maker’s mother happens to be in the room – when I say that the movie does not altogether succeed in capturing either the spirit or the essence of Sylvia Plath or of Ted Hughes. How could it? This kind of venture – the orthodox biopic – is, at best, a resolutely waxy version of entertainment. The purpose, in a Madame Tussaud’s sort of way, is to emulate an original. But as few of the audience have ever encountered the original, the exercise often has a curiously pointless air. A work of art asks to be judged by a standard which has no meaning for the majority of its spectators. An actor is compelled, say, to scratch her ear, on no other grounds but that ‘Oh, Sylvia always scratched her ear …’ Who’s in charge here? The artist or the subject? What’s more, there is, inevitably, in any film about someone like Plath, a degree of speculation about things of which, by their nature, we can know nothing, and whose inauthentic portrayal any modestly sensitive audience is going to find deeply offensive. (I should declare an interest. I was at one stage, like everyone else, approached to write the screenplay – for Meg Ryan, as I remember – and refused on the grounds that I had no idea why Sylvia Plath put her head in the oven. I equally felt I had no moral right to reconstruct the dialogue and sentiments of a marriage to which I had no privileged access. )

However, even at what was inevitably...