Bøger af David Hare

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

This second volume of plays by David Hare contains work from the 1970s and 1980s which confirmed him as one of the major contemporary playwrights in the English language. It includes Fanshen, his remarkable 1975 play which focused on the Chinese Revolution with Brechtian subtlety, his screenplay for Saigon: Year of the Cat, The Secret Rapture, his biting portrait of a family in crisis, and the plays A Map of the World and The Bay at Nice. The collection is introduced by the author.

'Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.'Gauguin's aphorism serves as the motto for this morality tale of two women, both in their sixties, whose lives are interwoven in ways neither of them yet understand. Madeline Palmer is a retired curator, living alone on the Isle of Wight. One day to her door comes Angela Beale, a woman she has met only once, who is now enjoying sudden success, late in life, as a popular novelist. The progress of a single night comes fascinatingly to echo the hidden course of their lives.

Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as 'completely unprintable'. The company that first presented them was prosecuted for obscenity in 1921. It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has re-set these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day. Using as much imaginative freedom in his turn as Ophuls did fifty years ago, and with just two actors playing all of the parts, Hare has created a fascinating landscape of dream and longing which seems both eternal and bang-up-to-date.

Oscar Wilde's 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

A young lawyer's involvement in her first case leads her through a criminal justice system - police, courts and prisons - which is cracking at the seams.Murmuring Judges is the second play in David Hare's highly acclaimed trilogy about British institutions. Racing Demon, which won four awards as Play of the Year in 1990, was the first part of the trilogy and examined the Church. The Absence of War, a play about the Labour Party, completed the trilogy.

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.

John Blakemore is a solitary boy who finds it impossible either to understand or adapt to the ways of the school. His adolescent earnestness put off teacher and pupil alike. And now suddenly he seems to be in danger of losing his only friend.David Hare's emotional new play, written at the invitation of the Rattigan estate as a response to The Browning Version, is a meditation on faith, learning and teenage friendship, played against the backdrop of a Britain still fighting to maintain an established rule.Collected with South Downs is the text of Hare's lecture Mere Fact, Mere Fiction, delivered to the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. In a famous defence of documentary theatre, the author celebrates the power of metaphor to transform factual quite as much as fictional material.

Berlin/WallIn two contrasted readings for the stage, David Hare visits a place where a famous wall has come down; then another where a wall is going up.BerlinFor his whole adult life, David Hare has been visiting the city which so many young people regard as the most exciting in Europe. But there's something in Berlin's elusive character that makes him feel he's always missing the point. Now, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the reunification, he offers a meditation about Germany's restored capital - both what it represents in European history, and the peculiar part it has played in his own life.WallThe Israeli/Palestine security fence will one day stretch 486 miles, from one end of Israel to the other. It will be four times as long as the Berlin wall, and in places twice as high. In this second monologue, the playwright recalls his trips to both Israel and the Palestinian territory and offers a history of the wall's building, an exploration of the philosophy behind it and a personal account of those who live on either side. Berlin premiered at the National Theatre, London, in February 2009 and Wall premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in March 2009.'Of all British dramatists, Hare is the one who has always seemed to have the sharpest awareness of what is going on around him, which is what makes him such an eagerly sought-after journalist.' Michael Billington

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.It's like a ship which you're being told is in apple-pie order, the decks are cleaned, the metal is burnished, the only thing nobody mentions, it's 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.

In vividly dramatic form, this play tells how a remote Chinese village comes to terms with Communism. Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese revolution created a whole new vocabulary in which a very important word is "fanshen" which literally means "to turn the body" or "to turn over." To hundreds of millions of landless and poor peasants it means to stand up, throw off the landlords' yoke, and gain land, stock, and houses. Moreover it means to enter a new world and this play is the story of how the peasants of Long Bow build a new world.2 women, 7 men

Forming the first part of the David Hare Trilogy (which also comprises of Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War) Racing Demon focuses on the Church of England. A disparate body, the Church now finds itself attracting unwanted publicity, wracked by the dissension of its members on matters of doctrine and practice and at odds with the government. In this climate the Reverend Lionel Espy and his team of clergymen struggle to make sense of their mission in South London, as the arrival of a zealous young curate intensifies their personal and professional problems.3 women, 8 men

Originally published: London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

In David Hare's "greatest play" (City Limits) two sisters, Isobel, a serene and good person, and Marion, an ambitious Tory Junior Minister, gather at the home of their late father for his funeral. Katherine, the sisters' young, alcoholic, stepmother, announces her intention of joining Isobel's design company. Reluctantly Isobel agrees and this act paves the way for tragedy and disaster involving Isobel's lover Irwin, and Marion's evangelical, earnest husband Tom.-4 women, 2 men

The Hours is David Hare's screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In extraordinary and ingenious ways, the film shows how a single day - and the novel Mrs Dalloway - inextricably link the lives of three very different women.

This title is a play about two crucial moments in Oscar Wilde's life: the day he decides to stay in England and face imprisonment, and the night after his release when the lover for whom he risked and lost everything betrays him.