Hare Writing Left-Handed

Collected Essays
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30124-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The leading British writer-director of his generation, David Hare is also one of the most productive. The last two years have seen the outstanding success of two stage plays, The Secret Rapture and Racing Demon, and the release of two films, Paris by Night and Strapless. The pieces collected here, written left-handed, form both a concealed professional autobiography and a lucid commentary on his work.

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

It always amuses playwrights when writers from other disciplines discover for themselves how hard it is to write a play. Yesterday’s playbills are marked with the names of some of this century’s most distinguished poets and novelists who suddenly found the ground soft underfoot when condescending to the theatre. The form is, for some reason, uniquely deceptive. Most good theatre writing looks pretty easy. A good play seems to pass at such speed and with so little appearance of effort that novelists, exhausted by a more cumbersome form, fall to thinking that the whole thing must depend on some trick. I have even heard novelists threaten to ‘dash a play off’. But the strange, necessary combination of vitality on the surface and power below – wave and tide, if you like – is harder than it looks. It is a mistake ever to write a play without giving your whole life to it. It can seldom be done left-handed.

This collection of essays is from my own left hand. I write prose very rarely. I have not written consistently for one publication, and a healthy proportion of what I submitted has been rejected by the people who asked for it. I explain elsewhere in this book that I discovered at the age of twenty-one that I had a facility for writing dialogue. But sentences which I intend purely for the page still look peculiar to me. I can’t wait to hear them spoken out loud, preferably by somebody else, who is pretending to be somebody else again. Through my own carelessness, a number of unpublished pieces have been lost. I was asked to introduce the Bedside Guardian in 1986, but the result was thought too controversial for publication. Liberal newspapers in my experience invite you to be sceptical about everything except liberal newspapers. In the period after they unprotestingly betrayed her to the Treasury Solicitor, the Guardian found the words ‘Sarah Tisdall’ very hard to set up in type. A long article about the Falklands War was not accepted by the Times Literary Supplement, this time because it was not possible to say certain things about the Prime Minister. The Financial Times found no place for an article they had requested on politicians’ use of language. Perhaps these editors were right. One unpublished piece is recovered here, however. It is an essay about Nick Bicât’s opera The Knife. This was killed by Esquire who accidentally added insult to injury by enclosing an internal memo from a senior editor who said the piece ‘did not really work’. Again, I am sure Esquire was correct. But, by a pleasant irony, I could not help noticing they planned to pay me more for writing an article about the opera than I had earned from directing the opera itself.

By chance, in the week after I had finished assembling this collection, I flew to Budapest where I attended an international writers’ conference, sponsored by the Wheatland Foundation. Two days before we arrived, Imre Nagy, the most eminent victim of the Russian repression in 1956, was taken from his unmarked grave and re-buried with honour after a public ceremony in Heroes Square. Listening to the admirable speeches by writers from the Middle East and South Africa, it was clear that in countries ruined by war or dictatorship all the usual questions about art and politics easily resolve themselves. In Israel novelists and poets effectively are the opposition, at least to some of their government’s more extreme policies. Yet the English writers were at the same conference the subject of a familiar attack from a literary critic, a fellow countryman who wished to argue that in Britain people had very little to complain about, and that looking proportionately at the horrors of the world, playwrights in particular would do better to celebrate the quality of life they enjoyed than to go on moaning about its few and occasional shortcomings. He argued that writers in England felt themselves powerless because they had sacrificed what he called their ‘universality’ in order to emphasize everything which is dark and depressing in modern life.

This is so common and confused a view that it is hard to know how to unpick what is truly a tangle of misapprehensions. The first mistake is to imagine that British writers, at least of my acquaintance, feel themselves in any way marginalized, or indeed that they wish to have any greater influence on the affairs of the nation than they have already. In my experience, they do not wish more than any other citizens to bring about the fall of governments, or to force laws onto the statute book. One of the great pleasures of writing for the theatre in this country is that the ideas you express can be taken so seriously and enter so smoothly into the currency of political discussion. If the theatre may be said to lack influence at all, it is more likely to be down to the quality of the work it produces than to any inherent prejudice against it in the population at large. The audience is there and waiting, if you have something sufficiently urgent to say and if – a massive if, in the life of this government – you are able to command the resources with which to say it. Indeed, if you want to understand the social history of Britain since the war, then your time will be better spent studying the plays of the period – from The Entertainer and Separate Tables through to the present day – than by looking at any comparable documentary source.

Furthermore there is something mean and patrician in the proposition that in countries which enjoy the right of dissent, it is the duty of writers to refrain from using it; as if freedom were not a right, but a privilege. Why should people fight so hard for this right if they are then to be told that it is immature to exercise it? In the company of so many writers who had been persecuted in their own countries, it became clear to me that writers, whether they intend to or not, serve much the same role in free as in totalitarian societies; they remind their audience of an alternative and perhaps more profound way of looking at experience than would otherwise be available. The degree of passion and skill with which they do this, and the effect they then have, may depend either on their circumstances or, goodness knows, on their character. But in each country the job ends up essentially the same. In writing about The Knife I introduce a huge subject into which I can make only the slightest inroad, but I try to suggest that morale-building orthodoxies are just as prevalent and just as insistently propagated in the West as in the East.

As to the charge that British writers in general stress unduly what is most disturbing in modern life, then I have to assume from the response of the audience to the variety of plays they see that a number of them share this interest, and identify with some of the dissatisfactions they see expressed. For myself, I was drawn into working in the theatre in what I wrongly took to be an apocalyptic time. In the opening lecture of the book, which is in part a memoir of my one-time tutor Raymond Williams, I describe a mood in the late sixties which had me decide that I wanted to set about dramatizing the crisis I then believed Britain to be in. In the second lecture, I describe some of the hard lessons I learnt in trying to make this impulse work in practice. Over the twenty years that I have continued writing, almost everything in my approach has changed. I have become fascinated by the formal problems of film and theatre, which once had no interest for me; I have moved from running small travelling groups to writing and directing on the largest stages I could find; and I have, in recent years, been drawn less to attacking the iniquities of a particular social system than to illustrating the dilemmas of all those who still struggle with the idea of what a good life might be.

In Pravda Howard Brenton and I tried to show that even if a man believes in nothing, he will always triumph over the man who cannot decide what he believes. Throughout the early 1980s liberal institutions were rolled over by their enemies, because they had no clue how to organize themselves to fight. The truly culpable figures in the wild comedy of the real-life Fleet Street take-overs were not the proprietors, who were after all only pursuing their own ends by their own standards, but the journalists and editors, who seemed not to know what on earth either their ends or their standards were. When I wrote The Secret Rapture I found I was drawing again, though more tentatively, on the same question, asking how destructive you need to become when dealing with destructive people. Neither of the sisters in the play is entirely good or bad. One, Marion, is a Tory MP who finds herself increasingly forced to pretend that life’s problems are more simply soluble than they are. The other, Isobel, is trying to survive without a theory of evil among people who undoubtedly wish her ill. In Strapless, Lillian Hempel, an American doctor, is shown fighting to do a good day’s work in the current National Health Service. And in Racing Demon, four clergymen try to make sense of their mission against impossible odds in the inner city. I feel I am only one among many when I say that, more and more, I find myself moved by people who have no apparent place in the much touted modern Western ethos, and who will never know any of its equally touted rewards.

Hemingway said politics in literature were the bits that readers would skip in fifty years’ time. We all know what he meant. But a sense of politics seems to me no more nor less than part of being...