Analysis

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David Hare’s creative work can be sorted into three categories: plays he wrote and directed himself, scripts written for film and television productions, and plays written in collaboration with Howard Brenton and others. In discussing Hare for the journal Modern Drama, C. W. E. Bigsby described the playwright as having been shaped by his times, the political turmoil and social upheaval of the student rebellions of 1968 and the growing dissent over Western policy in Southeast Asia. Bigsby also noted that 1968 was the year that “marked the beginnings of the theatrical fringe in London.” Active in fringe theater from the beginning of his dramatic career, Hare became one of the architects of the fringe movement.

Early in his career, for example, Hare became interested in dramatic collaboration, which later led to successful partnerships with Howard Brenton—Brassneck in 1973 and Pravda in 1985. At the Royal Court Theatre in 1971, Hare instigated an experiment in group collaboration that resulted in the play Lay By, a group effort of seven writers (Trevor Griffiths, Brian Clark, Stephen Poliakoff, Hugh Stoddard, and Snoo Wilson, along with Brenton and Hare), stimulated by a Sunday Times feature by Ludovic Kennedy, concerning an ambiguous rape case that might have resulted in an erroneous conviction. The Royal Court rejected the play, but Hare’s colleagues in the Portable Theatre Company mounted a production directed by Wilson in conjunction with the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Portable Theatre also produced another collective effort in which Hare was involved as a writer, England’s Ireland, in 1972.

The rationale for the Portable Theatre was political. The idea was to have a touring company that would address working-class audiences, an “antagonistic theatre,” as Brenton described it, designed for “people who have never seen the theatre before.” The plays produced were intended to be controversial in nature (Lay By was an exercise in sexual politics, for example, reconstructing a rape and interspersing the reconstruction with a pornographic photo session) and to challenge conventional assumptions and the traditional forms and methods of the established theater.

Hare has a particular genius for designing ingeniously constructed, unpredictable plots and strong, ambiguous characters that defy immediate classification and interpretation. The male characters tend to be flawed, either because they are infirm of purpose and self-deceived, or because they are all too purposeful and self-assured, in some instances even brutal. In Hare’s male characters, civilized behavior and even signals of basic decency can be signs of weakness. In Pravda, Andrew May’s apparently “good” qualities (bourgeois ambition, a dedication to the work ethic, a capacity for moral outrage) are in fact merely the product of an unthinking liberal idealism, which easily gives way to his monstrous hatred for Le Roux and his absolute thirst for vengeance. Brock, the diplomat in Plenty, is also misled by his emotions.

“Decent” people are not survivors in the kind of world Hare imagines, a world that requires intellectual toughness for survival. The idealist, like the sympathetic Darwin of Plenty, cannot stand a chance when countered by the unfeeling pragmatists who operate the machinery of state. Hare’s men, often dominated by career ambitions, gradually lose their integrity while serving the corrupt and corrupting establishment of government and big business. They give themselves to these enterprises and are transformed into cogs in the machinery of state, disposable and interchangeable parts. The career diplomat Darwin of Plenty , for example, has given a lifetime of loyal service to the Foreign Office but is betrayed by his superiors during the Suez Crisis. Determined to speak his...

(This entire section contains 5148 words.)

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mind and tell the truth, an honorable course of action, he is crushed and his career ruined. This is the sort of career from which Susan extricates her husband, but Brock, lacking her perspective, can only regret the career loss and resent Susan’s interference.

The male characters, then, are driven by ambition and the lure of professional success; their vision will be clouded and their integrity compromised. Brock is not a fool, but he will not conclude, as Susan apparently does, that a state bureau that will betray a career loyalist such as Darwin and make a scapegoat of him is not worthy of one’s service. In Pravda, with its broad, satiric distortions, Andrew can be seen as a fool because his self-betrayal is expanded to farcical proportions. In a more restrained context, Andrew might be seen as a parallel figure to Brock. In the end, Andrew’s integrity is compromised when he goes back to Le Roux to edit the sleaziest tabloid in England, but the man is so stupidly devoted to his profession that he hardly seems to care that he has lost his integrity and self-respect. Rebecca has attempted to clarify his decision and to explain the consequences, but to no avail. In a more subtle way, Susan performs a similar function for Brock in Plenty, but Brock is so ordinary, so average, and so typical in his ambition that audiences may miss the point.

Plenty may be mistaken for domestic melodrama (even though Susan is hardly a typical melodramatic heroine), but the movement is toward pathos and tragedy in the way men allow themselves to be transformed and corrupted into banality. The meaning of Pravda is the more easily recognized by its satiric approach and farcical distortions. Even so, Gavin Millar, in Sight and Sound, praised Plenty as “one of the few recent texts, in theatre or cinema, that undertakes an unpretentious but serious review of postwar Britain’s decline.”

The Great Exhibition

In this context, Hare may be regarded as a social critic functioning as a practicing dramatist with a flair for satire. His play The Great Exhibition is a political satire treating a Labour member of Parliament, Charles Hammett, swept into office during the great Labour victory of 1965 and swept out of office when the Conservative Party returned to power in 1970. Peter Ansorge has called the play a parody of “middle-class playwrights who have turned to working-class communities both for inspiration and as an escape from the more subtle dilemmas of their own environment and class.”

Fanshen

Hare’s interest in politics is also obvious in Fanshen, a play based on a book by William Hinton, an American who went to China “as a tractor technician,” as Hare has described him, “both to observe and help the great land reform programmes of the late 1940’s.” Hare felt “an obligation to portray Chinese peasants” of the village of Log Bow “in a way which was adequate to their suffering” but was “not interested in portraying the scenes of violence and brutality which marked the landlords’ regime and its overthrow.” After seeing the play, Hinton objected to Hare’s “liberal slant” and urged the playwright to revise the play so as to provide a clear Marxist emphasis, but Hare incorporated only a few of Hinton’s list of 110 suggested emendations. Fanshen (the title is translated as “to turn the body,” or, alternatively, “to turn over”) was written for the Joint Stock Company in 1974 and opened in Sheffield before moving on to the ICA Terrace Theatre in London in April of 1975.

Teeth ’n’ Smiles

As has been noted, Hare’s artistic sensibilities were no doubt influenced by the events of 1968, and his early work suggests a theater of political commitment and protest, carried into the 1970’s. His play Teeth ’n’ Smiles, produced in 1975 at the Royal Court Theatre, has been called “a metaphor for British society” and “an elegy for the vanished visions of the late Sixties” because of the way it treats rock music and popular culture.

The action is set at Cambridge on June 9, 1969, and centers on a performance of a rock band for the May Ball of Jesus College. This concert proves to be a disaster when Maggie, the lead singer of the group, gets drunk, insults the audience, and is finally sent to prison on a drug charge. The musicians regard their privileged audience with contempt: “Rich complacent self-loving self-regarding self-righteous phoney half-baked politically immature evil-minded little shits.” Interviewed about the play by Theatre Quarterly, Hare claimed it was intended to question “whether we have any chance of changing ourselves.”

In his survey British Theatre Since 1955: A Reassessment (1979), Ronald Hayman criticizes the play for setting up Cambridge as symbolizing a repressive capitalist system, concluding that “this kind of play bases its appeal on giving the audience a chance to believe that there is a common enemy which can be fought.” Hare’s targets in this play are self-delusion, class guilt, and class war, but the play mainly attacks the upscale educational establishment, represented by Cambridge (which Hare knew at firsthand), and has been regarded as an indictment of the detached university intellectuals.

Knuckle

The protagonist of Knuckle, which opened at London’s Comedy Theatre in March of 1974, is far removed from the privileged setting of Cambridge. He is a tough-minded vulgarian who is pragmatic and cynical about the hypocrisy of his world and his own family. Curly Delafield has returned to his home in Guildford seeking information about the disappearance of his sister Sarah, who had worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Curly is a blunt and brutal man. He had not seen his sister in twelve years, but he is determined to discover what has happened to her.

Sarah’s overcoat was found on the beach at Eastbourne, famous for a ghastly murder that was committed there in the spring of 1924. Apparently Sarah either committed suicide or was murdered. The play therefore involves a process of detection, as those close to Sarah, a journalist named Max, her friend Jenny, and her father, are subjected to Curly’s relentless interrogation. The mystery of her disappearance is solved at the end, after a sordid story of scandal and blackmail has been brought to light.

Curly is extremely cynical, a man who has been involved in selling arms, and in this regard he resembles in his amoral outlook the character of Andrew Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara (1905). Curly is habitually skeptical of men and their motives, including his own father. His view of the world is revealed by his motto: “Every man has his own gun. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a fact.” In a mean world, Curly does not “pick fights” but merely provides weapons: “They’re going to kill each other with or without my help,” he claims. London is viewed as the corrupt center of a corrupt and fallen world, and the corruption has spread to Guildford. As Curly remarks at the end of the play, “In the mean square mile of the City of London they were making money. Back to my guns.” Nearly everyone in this play is contaminated by money.

Knuckle is experimental in the way it mixes genres. The play develops as an apparent murder mystery, a whodunit that leaves open the possibility of suicide but turns out to be merely a parody of a conventional thriller. The sleuth Curly is like a stripped-down, plain-spoken Andrew Undershaft wearing a Mike Hammer mask, a very private eye. In fact, however, the play is an allegory of family betrayal, capitalist greed, and corruption. Hare’s declared intention in writing it was “to subvert the form of the thriller to a serious end.”

Curly is not a likable character because he is so cynical and so crude, but his character, shaped by the world that has molded it, is at least redeemed by his brutal honesty. He is not self-deluded, as so many of Hare’s characters seem to be.

A Map of the World

One of Hare’s most ambitious plays that attempts to take on human delusion on a global scale is A Map of the World, first performed at London’s Lyttleton Theatre in January of 1983. The title comes from Oscar Wilde: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at . . . ,” and the central conflict is a philosophical argument between a Marxist idealist, Stephen Andrews, and a conservative “realist,” an expatriate celebrity Indian writer named Victor Mehta; the two have been invited to address a UNESCO conference on world poverty in Bombay.

The play is complicated by the way it is framed, with the action shifting from the original confrontation to a filmed reconstruction being shot in London, as the audience realizes when scene 1 gives way to scene 2. This polemical play has been criticized for being too experimental in its framework and conception and too ambitious in scope, taking on issues of artistic freedom, world poverty, Third World nationalism, political compromise, and the decline of Western civilization, in the midst of a rhetorical contest partly based on sexual jealousy. “Unarguably,” Hare has confessed, “I was trying to do too many things at once, and although I have now directed three productions of the play, I cannot ever quite achieve the right balance between the different strands.”

Plenty

Hare describes A Map of the World as a “disputatious play” that intended “to sharpen up people’s minds, to ask them to remember why they believe what they do.” Perhaps this goal was better achieved in the earlier play, Plenty, despite the puzzlement over motivation evident in the reviews of the later film version. Plenty was one of Hare’s most successful plays but also one of his most ambiguous. It was first performed at London’s Lyttleton Theatre in 1978, starring Kate Nelligan as Susan Traherne, the protagonist, before going on to Broadway. In 1985, Hare reshaped the script for the motion picture adaptation. The film version rearranged the opening, starting the action at St. Benoît, France, in November of 1943, rather than in the Knightsbridge area of London in 1962, presumably to establish Susan’s character from the start as a young Englishwoman serving the French Resistance behind enemy lines during World War II.

Thereafter, in general, the film follows the chronology of the play, which mainly concerns Susan’s difficulty in adjusting to civilian and domestic life in England after the war in the time of “plenty” that was to follow. The play seems to document a movement from innocence to insanity, as Susan restlessly moves from one job to another and from one relationship to another, presumably trying to recapture the excitement she knew with her wartime lover, a British agent in France known only by his code name, Lazar. After a brief flirtation with a working-class lover named Mick, whom she had selected to father a child in a liaison that only proved frustrating to both of them, she agrees to marry a career diplomat, Raymond Brock, whose career she later destroys for no clearly explained reason.

With regard to Susan, Hare has written that he was struck by a statistic “that seventy-five percent of the women flown behind the lines for the Special Operations Executive were subsequently divorced after the war.” The play, which dramatizes Susan’s restlessness in this context, has been criticized for its failure to explain her motives. After all, Raymond Brock seems to be a decent character who sincerely cares for his disturbed wife. Hare describes him as a young man of “delightful ingenuousness” and has noted that it would be a mistake to play him as a fool. His character is blemished, however, by the corrupt institution he serves, the Foreign Office. In a less obvious way than Andrew May in Pravda, Brock is ruined by his professionalism and his dedication to an unworthy career.

On the surface, Susan may appear to be maladjusted and irrational. She expresses the need to “move on” several times during the course of the play, but at first glance it seems that she is only able to “move on” from one job to another or from one relationship to another. Psychologically, she does not seem to be able to “move on” from the excitement of love and life behind enemy lines during the war. When she is much later reunited with Lazar in England, she discovers that he has “moved on” to shabby domesticity and a life without joy or enthusiasm. The danger of “moving on” in the sense of adjusting to a changing commonplace world is that this could mean nothing more than accepting banal conformity.

Susan’s character is vibrant because she resists that kind of commonplace adjustment. Hare has written that men “are predisposed to find Susan Traherne unsympathetic.” The commonplace judgment likely to be made about Susan is that she is emotionally unstable, if not completely deranged. “It’s a common criticism of my work,” Hare notes in his postscript to the play, “that I write about women whom I find admirable, but whom the audience dislikes.”

The case against Susan “makes itself, or is made by the other characters,” Hare adds, but the character is remarkable in her fierce independence and quite extraordinary in her behavior, which Hare believes should create “a balance of sympathy” throughout the play. Hare has written that he intended to show through Susan “the struggle of a heroine against a deceitful and emotionally stultified class.” Her motives are submerged and complex, no doubt, but if that is a criticism of the character, it is one that could also be leveled at Hamlet. The mystery of motivation is not necessarily a flaw in a complex and enduring drama.

Pravda

Hare’s most critically acclaimed play after Plenty was Pravda, a biting satire of farcical dimensions on the newspaper industry in Great Britain and the dangers of collusion between Whitehall and Fleet Street, between government and the press. Pravda was written with Hare’s earlier collaborator Brenton and appears to be a not-so-thinly-veiled attack upon the brand of journalism represented by the Australian press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who took over The Times of London, just as Pravda’s central character, Lambert Le Roux (from South Africa rather than Australia) takes over the most influential establishment in Brenton and Hare’s fictional London, The Victory.

Pravda premiered at the National Theatre in 1985, with Anthony Hopkins gaining rave notices for his caricature of Le Roux. Murdoch was reportedly angered by the play. Trevor Nunn, enjoying the limelight of Les Misérables (1985), which he directed and adapted as a musical from Victor Hugo’s novel, told Newsweek that Murdoch “was extremely incensed and sent out the word to get the National and the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company, whose London home is the Barbican Arts Centre], the two subsidized theatres” in Great Britain. Nunn and Peter Hall, who was instrumental in creating the three-auditorium National Theatre complex on London’s South Bank, were both disappointed that the government of Margaret Thatcher did not support the integrity of the National Theatre in the “totally corrupt campaign” (as Hall described it) that followed. When government subsidies to the arts were cut (threatening to close down the National’s smallest experimental auditorium in the complex), the director of the National must have sensed political pressure nearly as bizarre and dangerous as what is imagined in the Brenton and Hare play.

Pravda shows Hare’s skill as a gadfly, questioning not only journalistic ethics but the larger issue of truth in journalism as well. This “comedy of excess” (as Hare described it) concerns the monopolizing of newspapers in England by the ruthless Lambert Le Roux. The action opens with Le Roux’s takeover of a provincial paper, the Leicester Bystander, hardly a paradigm for journalistic ethics even before Le Roux’s bid. Moira Patterson, a local shop owner maligned by the newspaper by mistake, goes to the editorial offices to demand a retraction. The cynical editor, Harry Morrison, and his subordinate, Andrew May (soon to become the new editor-in-chief) tell her “we . . . don’t publish corrections,” because “what is printed must be true,” and so “to print corrections is a kind of betrayal” of the public trust. May considers this perverse logic a matter of journalistic ethics.

This satiric introduction to an already corrupt world of journalism hardly inspires confidence in the Leicester Bystander and what it represents. The corruption of this provincial paper, however, pales in comparison to Andrew’s later experiences as editor of The Victory, a national paper, a “paper for England.”

Although billed as a comedy and often howlingly funny, Pravda is an extremely bitter satire that manages to strike out at corruption in high places and to spoof newspapers at all levels and television journalism as well. Besides The Victory, Le Roux owns a gutter tabloid (famous for its nudes) called The Tide and also attempts to take over a left-wing paper called The Usurper (shades of The Guardian?). Once in power, Le Roux fires underlings with the gleeful abandon of the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). A fired journalist from The Victory regrets most that he will never again appear on a television talk show called Speak or Shut Up. Now, he will have to “sit at home shouting at the television like ordinary people.”

In his bluntness, Le Roux resembles the unsentimental Curly of Knuckle, blown up to monstrous proportions, a vindictive Citizen Kane running amok. There is no clever Hamlet to counter the villainy of this Claudius, as Hare’s satire seems to be moving in the direction of tragedy. The tragic vision depends on a sense of justice, however, and finally all that appears in Hare’s bitter satiric world is a sense of the absurd so total that railing against it is clearly pointless.

Andrew’s wife, Rebecca, gives him a “leaked” document that indicates a breach of public trust by the Minister of Defence concerning the transport of plutonium in flasks that are demonstrably unsafe. When Andrew decides to print the story in The Victory, Le Roux fires him. When Andrew and other fired journalists from The Victory take over The Usurper, Le Roux and his subordinate trick them into running libelous stories about their former employer, then threaten Andrew with litigation and bankruptcy.

At the end, Andrew is humiliated into begging Le Roux’s forgiveness and editing The Tide as a means of penance. Practicing journalism is more important to him, finally, than ethics, integrity, truth, or love. A muddled idealist not fully understanding his presumed convictions, Andrew deserves to become a lackey to the demoniac Le Roux, devoting his skill to purveying falsehood and smut, the foreman of what Le Roux calls his “foundry of lies.”

Rebecca, who loves Andrew, is forced to abandon him after he succumbs to his bloodlust for revenge against Le Roux (his tragic flaw, if this play could be a tragedy) and after he finally sells his soul to the demon magnate who believes “No one tells the truth. Why single out newspapers?” Rebecca is the only character clever enough to see through Le Roux’s deviousness, but she is powerless to take action against him. Otherwise, this bitter, satiric world is populated by mean-spirited, unscrupulous, dishonest people.

Paris by Night and Strapless

Hare’s later plays and films continued to advance his criticism of Tory society and Thatcherism. His films Paris by Night (starring Charlotte Rampling and Michael Gambon) and Strapless (starring Blair Brown, Bridget Fonda, and Bruno Ganz) extended his interest in conflicted women characters trying to resolve the contradictions in their lives. To prepare himself for Paris by Night, Hare attended the annual Tory party conference in Blackpool to observe closely the “new Tory woman,” as he described, in his introduction to the screenplay published by Faber and Faber in 1988, the new breed of women who entered conservative politics in Great Britain during the Thatcher years. Also in 1988, he created his most sympathetic woman character, Isobel Glass, for his play The Secret Rapture. Isobel is set in conflict with her sister, Marion French, who has become a Thatcherite junior minister and who believes that not to make money is “worse than stupid; it’s irresponsible.” The humanistic Isobel is saintly and is ultimately destroyed by the morally corrupt world that she inhabits.

Racing Demon

Hare then began a trilogy of plays dealing with British institutions. The first play of the trilogy, Racing Demon, is about ecclesiastical betrayal and the Church of England and focuses on a well-meaning minister who lost his faith in God but found purpose in serving the needy. The minister’s career, however, is threatened and ruined by his superiors for political reasons.

Murmuring Judges

Another play, Murmuring Judges, concerns the legal system. A note on the curtain of the Olivier Theatre explained the title: “In Scottish law, a form of contempt, meaning ‘to speak ill of the judiciary’ or ‘to scandalize the court.’” Hare added in a note to the play, published by Faber and Faber, “It is still an offense in Scottish law.”

The published text of Murmuring Judges begins with a quotation from Ogden Nash: “Professional people have no cares/ Whatever happens, they get theirs.” The play is about moral corruption and compromise in the prison service (a young Irishman is jailed and brutalized unjustly) and about an idealistic woman lawyer who is taught a lesson about how justice operates in England. Hare therefore continued to write from a position of political outrage, satirizing and dramatizing the foibles of his time.

The Absence of War

The third play in the trilogy, The Absence of War, combines the cinematic spectacle of Murmuring Judges with a simple plot line reminiscent of Racing Demon. Based on the Labour Party and its attempt to win power in the general election of 1992, The Absence of War was the product of much research by Hare, who interviewed reporters, politicians, and their advisers. Dramatizing the workings of the British parliament and the electoral process, the play also includes a critique of the Labour Party and its failure to govern or unite English society.

Amy’s View, The Judas Kiss, and The Blue Room

After this trilogy, which questioned the Church of England, the British legal system, and, finally, the Labour Party, Hare turned to less overtly political plays. His next play, Amy’s View, is a witty examination of the troubled relations of a stage actress and her daughter, from whose perspective the story is told. However, although this is a play centered on a personal relationship between two women, the narrative also is a metaphor for the political ups and downs of Britain in postwar society. The Judas Kiss, a short play written during the same period, is also a story of a personal relationship between two people, speculating on what might have happened behind closed doors between playwright Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas.

In 1997 Hare freely adapted Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler’s famous play, Reigen (pb. 1900, pr. 1920; Hands Around, 1920; also as La Ronde, 1959). Like the original, Hare’s play explored the erotic drive as a ruthless and powerful force in modern life. Retitled The Blue Room, this production attracted much attention because of the nudity of its star character, which perhaps overshadowed the play’s message.

Skylight

The most important play following the trilogy, however, is Skylight, which was first performed in England in 1995 and won the 1996 Olivier Award. Skylight was written with reference to the era in British life from 1979 to 1990, when Margaret Thatcher presided over a shift from a socialist economy to a free market society in England. The play concerns the possible reconciliation between two estranged lovers, whose lives diverged when Britain’s old socialist economy unraveled. The break between the two principal characters, a teacher named Kyra and a businessman named Tom, is also symbolic of divisions within English society itself. The prosperous Tom, who appreciates “the good life,” is contrasted with Kyra, whose life of service and personal sacrifice has led to significant material discomfort. As in Amy’s View, a close relationship between two people is blended with larger political and social themes—in this case the question is the sustainability of a society that has hopelessly divided itself into two separate political and philosophic camps. Like his other plays, Skylight continues Hare’s exploration of social and political fragmentation in postwar Britain and indicates the need for a new consensus that will allow for balance rather than dogged opposition.

Via Dolorosa

In 1997, the Royal Court Theatre sent Hare on a series of trips to the Middle East to gather material for a play on the conflicts in the region. Hare ended up writing not a play but a dramatic monologue titled Via Dolorosa, which he performed himself in London and New York, and which eventually became a television play. In the course of his monologue, Hare relates the views of more than thirty people from the region, including both Palestinians and Israelis. In addition to exploring the tensions in the Middle East, Hare also explores his own values and spiritual life, his own personal “via dolorosa.” Hare ends by contrasting those in the Middle East, whose lives are passionately involved in issues of faith and politics, with the foundering convictions and commitments of British society. Like his previous work, Via Dolorosa takes a specific and situation and heightens it so that it can come to stand for a general and important political or moral situation.

My Zinc Bed

Hare continued to wed the personal and the political with My Zinc Bed, his first play of the twenty-first century. Like some of his other plays, this was already “in the air,” inspired by the case of Audrey Kishline, the founder of a support group advocating moderation in contradistinction to Alcoholics Anonymous’s (AA’s) well-known policy of abstinence. In the play it is the character Victor who represents the Kishline perspective. An Internet entrepreneur and former communist, Victor, like Kishline, ends up driving while intoxicated and dying in a car crash. His opposite number is Paul, a poet, an alcoholic in recovery who subscribes to the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Like Skylight, this play once again opposes a prosperous businessman with someone who is more sensitive but less successful. The entrepreneurial Victor is contrasted with a humbled Paul, whose struggles with alcohol have led him to lose faith in Victor’s libertarian philosophy of individual empowerment. Paul’s sense of his own vulnerability and weakness has led him to depend on the AA system of support, which allows him to survive, albeit in a wounded, broken condition. Like Skylight, this play uses a highly charged personal situation and weds it to a substructure that is symbolic and abstract. The larger issues in this case concern the fall of communism, the rise of the Internet, and the adoption of a “new economy” moral philosophy associated once again with the Thatcher revolution. This ability to take the lives and feelings of specifically realized contemporary characters and to brilliantly indicate their relationship to larger social, political, or philosophical themes continues to make Hare one of Britain’s most important playwrights.