David Hare

He's not like what you'd call rational-articulate. He doesn't want argument. For Christ's sake, Kyra, you teach. Language belongs to the past. This is the world of Super Mario. Bang! Splat! Spit out your venom and go. It's not like, you know . . . when we were together. You and me talking. Talking down the stars from the sky.Skylight premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1995. It won an Olivier Award for Play of the Year; and an Evening Standard Award for Revival of the Year, 2014.'There are times in the theatre when you suddenly find yourself in the grip of silence. There is no fidgeting or coughing, no shifting about in seats: the audience's attention is so tense it is almost palpable. This is because it is both thrilling and dangerous: a fight to the death, or the dawning of salvation. David Hare's Skylight is punctuated by such moments. They are the signs that a dramatist of the first rank is writing at full stretch, in complete command of his material, undogmatic and unafraid, unforgiving and compassionate.' Sunday Times

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

1962: A public school on the South Downs.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.

The third winner of the Yale Drama Series competition for emerging playwrights—a haunting and provocative imagining of the reunion, years later, of a Guantánamo detainee and the female interrogator who tortured him It’s been fifteen years since Guantánamo, fifteen years since Bashir last saw his U.S. Army interrogator, Alice. Bashir is now dying of a disease of the liver, an organ that he believes is the home of the soul. He tracks down Alice in Texas and demands that she donate half her liver as restitution for the damage wrought during her interrogations.But Alice doesn’t remember Bashir; a PTSD pill trial she participated in while in the army has left her without any memory of her time there. It is only when her inquisitive fourteen-year-old daughter begins her own investigation that the fragile peace of mind that Alice’s drug-induced oblivion enabled begins to falter.Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s powerful drama asks important and difficult questions: Is guilt a necessary form of moral reckoning, or is it an obstacle to be overcome? Will the price of our national political amnesia be paid only by the next generation—the daughters and sons who were never there?Upon awarding the prize, David Hare wrote, “We admired the play because—although it was stylishly written, although the governing metaphor and basic realism were held in a fine balance—it also recalled the political urgency which had propelled a previous generation of writers into the theatre in the first place.”

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.

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.

In 1991, before an election they did not expect to win, the Conservative government made a fateful decision to privatize the railways. As a result, the taxpayer subsidizes rail more lavishly then ever before. In The Permanent Way, David Hare, working with actors from the Out of Joint Company, tells the intricate, madcap story of a dream gone sour, by gathering together the first-hand accounts of those most intimately involved - from every level of the system.

"Politics is about the reconciliation of the irreconcilable," says Nadia Blye, a young American war reporter turned academic who teaches political studies at Yale. With her faith in academia beginning to erode and memories from her time in the Balkans and the Middle East haunting her, Nadia travels with her boyfriend, Philip Lucas, to rural England to visit her father, Oliver, who has his own past to reckon with. The challenge of Nadia's encounter with Oliver forces decisions on her that will affect her for the rest of her life. For thirty-five years, David Hare has written plays that capture the flavor of our times and address the interconnection between our secret motives and our public politics. In The Vertical Hour, he continues his investigation of the morality of international intervention, and of how the war in Iraq impacts the lives of British and American citizens.

Stuff happens... And it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.'The famous response of American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the looting of Baghdad at a press conference in 2003 provides the title for David Hare's play about the extraordinary process leading up to the invasion of Iraq.Stuff Happens premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2004 and has subsequently been performed around the world.'Stuff Happens may make you openly boo, hiss, cheer or even cry, but it will also remind you why this 2,500 year-old art form remains the best way for human beings to collectively experience and contemplate the effects of war.' Los Angeles Times'A totally compelling play that ruthlessly exposes the dubious premises on which the Iraq war was fought... One comes out enriched, informed and moved by Hare's ability to turn recent politics into historical drama.' Guardian

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 Marion's 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

The Hours is David Hare's screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In Richmond, England in 1923, Virginia Woolf is setting out to write the first words of her new book. In Los Angeles in 1951, a housewife, Laura Brown, is contemplating suicide. And in present-day New York, a hostess, Clarissa Vaughan, is planning a party for her friends. 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.

'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.

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.

How do you fight without hate?Racing Demon reveals the struggle of four clergymen to make sense of their mission. David Hare's play opened at the National Theatre, London, in 1990 to universal acclaim, and won four awards as Play of the Year. Racing Demon was the first part of David Hare's trilogy of plays about British institutions; Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War completed the trilogy.

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. Hare's 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.

Examines the policies and politics that have kept hungry people from feeding themselves around the world, in both Third and First World countries.

David Hare's new adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's classic and notorious "La Ronde". With just two actors (Nicole Kidman and Ian Glenn at the Donmar Warehouse, London) playing all of the parts, he creates a fascinating landscape of dream and longing.

'My whole life, it's 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, they're fighting for something they believe in.' Via Dolorosa. In 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.

Kyra is surprised to see the son of her former lover at her apartment in a London slum. He hopes she will reconcile with his distraught, now widowed, father. Tom, a restless, self-made restaurant and hotel tycoon, arrives later that evening, unaware of his son's visit. Kyra, who was his invaluable business associate and a close family friend until his wife discovered their affair, has since found a vocation teaching underprivileged children. Is the gap between them unbridgeable, or can they resurrect their relationship?1 woman, 2 men

David Hare has established a unique reputation for plays that are at once personal and political, deeply serious and incredibly funny. He is the author of seventeen plays, many of which have been presented on Broadway. Included n this collection are Fanshen, A Map of the World, Saigon: Year of the Cat, The Bay at Nice, and The Secret Rapture.