SOURCE: “Nostalgic Rapture: Interpreting Moral Commitments in David Hare's Drama,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XL, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 23-37.

[In the following essay, Su examines Hare's sentimental vision of an idealized British past and its underlying function as a point of reference for interpreting contemporary political realities and moral conflicts.]

A deep, if problematic, nostalgia for the Great Britain of World War II suffuses the work of British playwright David Hare. Susan Traherne’s exuberant cry at the end of Plenty, “There will be days and days and days like this,” exemplifies Hare’s troubled nostalgia: the promise of social equality and national renewal with the war’s end presented as the final memory of a fragmenting psyche.¹ Hare identifies himself both personally and artistically in terms of World War II: “I was born in 1947, and it makes me sad to think that mine may be the last generation to care about this extraordinary time in English history. … I must also, if I am honest, admit that the urge to write about it came … from a romantic feeling for the period.”² Such a sentimental stance is interesting considering the importance Hare’s work places on political engagement in the present. Hare’s plays directly or indirectly examine how the post-war promise of “Plenty” did not materialize as the unity against Hitler during the war failed to translate into unity in reconstruction during peace.³ Characters in Hare’s drama seek something to which they can commit themselves even as they desperately stave off fears that their institutions are no longer worth the commitment. Neither the contemporary political Right nor Left offers the sense of mission shared across class lines during the war. Within this context the nostalgic past offers a mode of interpreting the present, a source for the moral framework Hare’s characters find so lacking in British society. This nostalgic framework demands faithfulness or constancy to a vision of the past against a contemporary world given to expediency. Individual moral action is determined through emulating role models of the longed-for past. The crucial question, however, is to what extent can a nostalgic vision of a Britain that perhaps never was provide a moral structuring principle allowing the possibility of right action in the present; more pointedly, can a moral response prove an adequate solution to what Hare has cast as political problems?

Since The Secret Rapture (1988), and through his trilogy of “institution” plays (Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War), Hare has moved more explicitly in the direction of moral drama. Gone are the wild days of the Portable Theatre, touring the country presenting plays concerned with the socialist message more than the drama itself:

I thought the political and social crisis in England in 1969 so grave that I had no patience for the question of how well written a play was. I was only concerned with how urgent its subject matter was, how it related to the world outside.⁴

The Hare who has become an institution at the National Theatre now writes about goodness:

I’m bored by propaganda, either from the left or right. But goodness makes me weep. I see Isobel [of The Secret Rapture] that way. So I said, Why don’t I write about goodness? Why be a smartass?⁵

The transition has not been effortless, Hare having at moments to forestall criticism that his nostalgia might equate with political disengagement, precisely the criticism leveled at the moral drama of his contemporary, Tom Stoppard.⁶

The problem of moral drama in general, and Hare’s and Stoppard’s specifically, is not that it chooses an apolitical stance. On the contrary, Stoppard has insisted that the political can never divorce itself from the moral sphere: “I believe all political acts must be judged in moral terms.”⁷ T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most rigorously systematic English moral dramatist of the twentieth century, throughout the 1930s opposed the theological-moral framework of Christianity to communism, finding the struggle between the two “religions” to define the crux of the modern dilemma: “There can only be the two [religions], Christianity and communism: and there, if you like, is your dilemma.”⁸ The difficulty moral drama faces is presenting within the confines of the stage a convincing basis for the moral vision. Eliot abandoned overt Christian thematics in his four later plays, seeking to expand his audience after Murder in the Cathedral, and consequently lost the clarity of his characters’ struggle to act within a decaying world. Stoppard, who in interviews has made more definite affirmations of God as Absolute in recent years, has only succeeded in translating this sense to his plays circuitously, using scientific paradigms as allegories of the possibility of free will, the limits of human perception, and the fundamental underlying order of the cosmos. Explicitly invoking grand theological frameworks has the air of dogmatism and lacks persuasiveness for audiences who do not already accept the framework. Yet locating a moral center not from an imposed theology but instead from a certain innateness, as Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara) and Arthur Miller (All My Sons) do, often drives such plays toward didacticism or vagueness of vision. Especially within the corpus of modern drama, the moral protagonist lacks dynamism, being defined only in opposition to an evil character, the transgressor, limit-breaker, or anti-conformist. Thus the protagonist’s moral vision becomes defined by his or her evil counterpart, without whom the protagonist is a cipher. And the “victorious” moral protagonist is essentially a conformist, static character, a reactionary to the dynamism of evil. The figures who stamp themselves in our imagination are the Iagos, Richards, and Undershafts who scoff at normative codes. Locating a moral basis in a nostalgic vision as Hare does rather than in a doxology has the additional difficulty of malleability (the absence of an absolute standard) not found in Stoppard or Eliot, for the meaning of the past is so tied to actions completed in the future. Yet even in the post-Thatcherite era, Hare fails to find in the great institutions—church, judiciary, government—a sense of mission comparable to what he envisions was shared by people of all classes during the war. Hare’s church in Racing Demon, unlike Eliot’s, struggles to hold itself together with a common liturgy against a feeling of God’s absence and the haunting question that closes the play: “Is everything loss?”⁹

Hence, the central struggle of Hare’s characters is to reconcile a sense of past hope and present betrayal, faced with a series of broken promises—personal and political—following the war and culminating in the Suez Canal fiasco. This last gasp of the dying colonial juggernaut not only confirmed the deception of the post-war promise but also questioned the memories of a unified past, insinuating naïve optimism. Although, during the dinner scene of Plenty, Susan Traherne bitingly differentiates the Suez operation from her work as an agent in occupied France, the two conflicts cannot but be compared. Susan’s failure to integrate both events within her conceptual framework precipitates her breakdown, for she cannot jettison the nostalgic past that has become most intimately her nor ignore her government’s betrayal. Belief in her work and, by extension, her government was vital to her survival: “You believed in the organization. You had to. If you didn’t, you would die” (188). The duplicity of the present government threatens Susan because her sense of self is built around the mission and purpose her government gave her, a sense of belonging. To find that its ideals also might have been duplicitous allows a creeping despair to pervade her psyche, which suggests that her constancy was to a vision without value, a vision never taken seriously by the government to which she pledged her life. Confronting a parallel crisis, Anna Seaton in Licking Hitler can only watch “the steady impoverishment of the people’s ideals, their loss of faith, the lying” since the war, unwillingly realizing that it brought unity without unity of purpose: “that whereas we knew exactly what we were fighting against, none of us had the whisper of an idea as to what we were fighting for.”¹⁰ Without this common external enemy, the lack of a shared institutional belief or policy becomes manifest. The old class-consciousness returns, if it ever left; yet the next generation, raised under a period of faith in government, continues to seek validation from institutions that increasingly insulate themselves from the people’s concerns. Jean Travers’s love, Jim Mortimer, in Hare’s movie Wetherby, dies needlessly over a card game in Malaya, a “half-war” for which he volunteered hoping to demonstrate his manhood and patriotism, leaving Jean to a life of loneliness and frustrated expectation. Much to the dread of Hare’s protagonists, finally what matters to the post-war government is preserving something of the glory that was the British Empire, regardless of the sacrifice. No opposition is tolerated even from within government—a lesson Leonard Darwin, a career diplomat reminiscent of nineteenth-century counterparts, learns painfully: “We have been betrayed … I have been lied to” (Hare, Plenty 175).

Darwin’s name gives the moment a sad irony; like his namesake Charles Darwin, Leonard must witness the vision of the world he helped to create reinterpreted in the name of expediency. Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection was twisted to provide “proof” for so many misguided social theories of “survival of the fittest.” Extrapolations from his theories, for instance, offered justification for the British Empire, which defined in so many ways the sense of Englishness that Leonard Darwin embodies. Yet “natural selection” ultimately necessitates superseding Englishness in the name of expediency. To save the empire, one must destroy everything the empire purportedly once stood for—such a contradiction boggles Darwin in Plenty, who has managed to misperceive the dark half of the ideology of empire. The very basis of Leonard’s morality insulates him instead of providing a framework to interpret action in the present world: he is “living in the past,” as it were. Noticeably, the younger diplomat Raymond Brock is neither surprised nor befuddled; through jettisoning past idealism he “adapts.”

Resignation becomes Darwin’s only option to express his sense of betrayal, his dissent. The mechanism of government within which he has acted no longer corresponds to his personal structure of belief, based on notions of nineteenth-century Englishness. Darwin cannot simultaneously hold his ideal of England and serve within a government which uses the ideal only as a means to an end. Although he has remained constant to his vision, the terms of his vision—what empire stands for—have changed. Darwin’s choice to disengage himself rather than reconcile his sense of the past to present events alienates him from the social field: he is never seen again in the play and dies unregarded five years after the Suez incident. Susan Traherne experiences a similar internal splitting between a pernicious contemporary world and an inaccessible past, her only shelter madness. The “Plenty” assumes a grotesque aspect, Susan finding “We’re rotten with cash” (Hare, Plenty 186), corrupted and without moral direction. In vain Susan seeks to do a good act—she jumps from career to career, finding none fulfilling; she agrees to marry Brock, hoping thereby to thank him for standing by her during her breakdown; she tries to give away her house to Alice and her “unmarried mothers” (198). But she fails to find in her past a means to “orient [herself] towards the good,” the vital function of a moral framework according to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.¹¹ The source of good for Susan lies lost in the past, and her failure to perceive an orientation toward achieving in the future the promises of the past leads her into disengagement through drugs and a breakdown that projects her into the past in the final scene. “Good” or right action is so immensely difficult for Susan to define in the present because she can find no satisfactory social role (seen in her continual career shifting) through which to realize her dream of a more egalitarian England. Postwar institutional standards of morality are primarily concerned with perpetuating the status quo. “Behaviour is all,” as Sir Andrew says (193); that is, outward conformity regardless of consequences and unconcerned with acts for moral ends.

In a sense, Sir Andrew’s framework insists on constancy to the past. Constancy itself does not provide an orientation, however; the diplomats under Sir Andrew simply cling to the past in fear of the future. Susan seeks (unsuccessfully) in her nostalgic past an orientation for the future. The diplomats cannot envision a future good, only future decline. Given this poverty of vision combined with the lack of a genuine alternative institutional recourse (i.e., the Left), Hare’s protagonists have little alternative to some form of nostalgic paradigm. They seek something sacred in the past, something eminently worth defending in the here and now. But the figures of Plenty become enraptured with the past rather than finding in it a good with which to orient themselves. While Susan’s memory of VE Day, the final scene of Plenty, stands as a condemnation of English institutions for failing to remain constant to past promises, her mental collapse that the moment signifies also suggests that Susan’s stance is somehow incommensurable with present reality.

Hare’s concern with “the intractability of goodness” becomes even more urgent in his play The Secret Rapture, where the main characters are born after the war and lack memories of alternatives to Thatcherism—the final extension of political betrayal and neglect arising after the failure of the welfare state.¹² Wrestling with the absence of an older English sensibility, signified by their dead father Robert Glass, the sisters Marion and Isobel and their stepmother, Katherine, must redefine their interrelationships without a stable embodiment of Englishness. The conspicuous absence of a stable figure of the past—each woman has a different vision of Robert—points to the problem of nostalgia as an interpretive matrix: without some engagement with the past, present motives are uninterpretable and thus “good” actions nearly impossible. Good actions, according to Charles Taylor, require an orientation toward the “good,” as defined by a moral framework. Yet the past itself, constructed from continual interpretations, lacks an absolute reality, making “good” in an ultimate sense difficult to apprehend concretely. Isobel, Irwin, and Marion each say they cannot make sense of existence; Katherine avoids, through her drinking, interpretive complexities; Tom’s Christianity, far from giving him a framework of understanding, is presented as patently ridiculous. Thus, answering this essay’s original question, whether the moral can offer genuine political solutions, requires first pursuing the question of goodness itself—if a moral vision requires an orientation toward the (nostalgic) good, can nostalgia provide a common good worth constancy?

Finding a shared good is so important because, according to Hare, evil arises from the valorization of expediency, the unwillingness to accept a coherent framework as more important than self-gain. John Morgan of Wetherby is described as a blankness, a “central disfiguring blankness,” without any scruple mitigating his desire.¹³ Nothing has sufficient value, within his conception of the world, as to deny the principle of self-gain. Consequently, it never occurs to him to feel guilt in stalking a classmate, Karen, and breaking into her dormitory, or in exhibiting his self-murder before Jean. Morgan accepts no realm outside of his own prerogatives: “I want some feeling! I want some contact! I want you fucking near me!” (Hare, Wetherby 114). A dark homology exists between Morgan, who invades the most private spaces (he also invites himself to Jean’s small dinner party), and the expediency of Thatcherism, which also accepts no bounds of privacy. Hare has said, “one of the effects of Thatcherism has been to introduce politics into every aspect of people’s lives.”¹⁴ Within this conception Thatcherite expediency is not itself a moral structuring principle—built upon directed limitation, boundary, and obligation—but rather a radical denial of the notion itself: one simply follows the impulse toward material gain.¹⁵ Good actions are impossible for the absolute Thatcherite. Expediency denies the reverence that characterizes nostalgia and thus denies any obligation to be true to past promises. It measures actions by success or personal gain rather than according to a categorical imperative (i.e., an action must be done because it is good regardless of personal consequences). So even when adherents of “Thatcherism” have “good” intentions, such as Brock in nursing Susan Traherne, frustration is not tolerated: “I am going to play as dirtily and ruthlessly as you,” he says, after telling her, “I won’t surrender till you’re well again. And that to me would mean your admitting one thing: that in the life you have led you have utterly failed, failed in the very, very heart of your life” (Hare, Plenty 200). Brock insists that Susan’s cure lies in not only exposing but also repudiating her most intimate and happy memories. Marion of The Secret Rapture, junior minister of the Department of the Environment, likewise has good intentions in trying to place her alcoholic, widowed stepmother Katherine with Isobel, Marion’s younger sister. Marion, however, never allows herself to become personally responsible for Katherine, who could impede her career. Instead, Marion mimics the discourse of old-line British morality, blackmailing Isobel with her own desire to do good.

Blackmail drives the action of most of Hare’s plays, from Plenty and Pravda to Wetherby, The Secret Rapture, and Racing Demon. As The Secret Rapture shows, the appeal of blackmail lies in that it allows characters without a moral framework to avoid personal accountability. Katherine’s demands for comfort, a place to stay, a job, the right to judge Irwin’s (Isobel’s lover) work, mask a desire to “just go somewhere and not have to put up with me.”¹⁶ Her continual encroachments into every part of Isobel’s life force Isobel to “put up with me,” to orient her actions in terms of caring for Katherine. The very brazenness of Katherine’s demand, that good people are “here to help trashy people like me” (Hare, Secret Rapture 19), seems to belie Irwin’s warnings of her “evil” (57). Hare’s fascination with blackmail stems from the deep challenge it places on moral frameworks. The blackmailer insists on radicalizing the framework in the act of mimicking it. Katherine takes the Judeo-Christian notion of charity that Isobel values and insists it be taken to an excessive conclusion, where Isobel must be continually responsible for her or else be hypocritical, “so fucking English” (16). Katherine lays claim to Isobel’s father, the “one person who ever believed in me” (15), separating Isobel from the symbol of her past and insinuating that she can only continue to possess the past, Robert, through her. Thus, Katherine denies the ability to change herself, transferring the onus of responsibility on to Isobel. Even when she stabs Isobel’s most important client, Katherine accepts no responsibility, makes no apology, blaming the drink and the clients for driving her “back into [her] terrible unconfidence” (73). Consequently, Katherine’s self-centeredness (both in the common sense of petty selfishness and in the sense that she strives to become the center of moral concern for the lives around her) blinds her to Irwin’s obsession, allowing Isobel’s murder near the end of the play.

Through much of The Secret Rapture Irwin appears as the most stable and mild character, his first lines noting how others consider him “prematurely middle-aged” (20). In contrast to Katherine’s continual importunities, his devotion to Isobel to her, seems benign: “I draw for you. That’s why I draw. To please you. To earn your good opinion. Which to me means everything” (50). Yet beneath this artist-muse relationship lies a latent demand for Isobel’s continual good opinion, without which his self-estimation cannot hold. Like Katherine, Irwin tries to impose a double-bind upon Isobel: she embodies Irwin’s structuring principle (guiding and praising his work) but also relinquishes her own independent guidance, defining herself in terms of supporting him. Isobel has apparently recognized for some time Irwin’s motivations but does not lash out at him until he insists on sleeping with her against her wishes, denying any bounds of privacy: “But I never hear the words [I love you] without sensing something’s being asked of me. The words drain me. From your lips they’ve become a kind of blackmail” (55).

Isobel’s severely delimited field of choice resembles Susan Traherne’s situation. The events surrounding the two women are driven by amoral if not immoral motivations, which do not require the interpretive consistency that moral frameworks demand. The women are paralyzed by situations in which apparently no choice allows for fidelity to the dream of the past: Susan must accept betrayal and corruption as the condition of her dream of “Plenty” or abandon her constitutive nostalgia; Isobel must choose to continue to love Irwin although he betrays her or choose to help Katherine, who similarly has no regard for her private identity. Isobel finds that others seek to redefine the interpretive foundations of her actions—her business is bought by Marion; Irwin insists that helping Katherine is wrong, arising from selfishness; Katherine asserts Isobel’s desire to do good is purely rhetoric, just part of the hypocritical English character. If Hare’s interests centered on exploring individual moral crises rather than shared moral solutions to political problems, then Isobel’s and Susan’s dilemmas need not be crippling. Arguably, an act could be good within the individual’s framework independent of external interpretations or the success of the act itself, solely based on the agent’s intentions. Isobel appears to believe this argument early in the play: the love that she finds to be her father’s orientation succeeds whether or not he “was taken for a ride”: “Honestly, I don’t think it matters much. The great thing is to love” (Hare, Secret Rapture 5). However, Isobel herself refuses the solution she attributes to her father. The problem underlying intentionalist morality is that by definition it cannot compel shared belief and orientation. Without being able to insist that particular acts must be interpreted as good, and not just good according to the agent’s intention, the moral loses the power to offer compelling political solutions. Hare depicts Isobel attempting to choose nothing, evading the responsibility of choice, withdrawing from Irwin, fleeing to the island Lanzarote.

Irwin’s renewed fixation upon Isobel after her flight (he had begun to seek sexual solace through Rhonda, Marion’s employee) points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of intentionalist moral frameworks. Defining goodness on the basis of the agent’s intentions creates a fundamentally self-centered ethical paradigm. Irwin’s obsessional love suggests that care for others must not come at their expense. Hare’s desire for a moral politics comes to the fore here: notions of the good must be shared and consensual. Irwin’s love meets neither of these criteria. Although love in the abstract seems like a benevolent good, the latent demand for mutuality subordinates the claimed care for the other to self-satisfaction. His good, in this way, becomes a necessity. Without his “one certain source of good” in Isobel, who has provided a schema of artistic and personal validation, Irwin finds himself bereft of an interpretive faculty: “I can’t make sense of life” (Hare, Secret Rapture 62, 75). His dissatisfaction with the newly expanded business, doubts about his own work, guilt for his secret agreement to Marion’s buyout of the designing firm he and Isobel share—all these vague yet intense feelings cathect upon a concrete symbol, Isobel’s departure, with the consequence that Irwin retroactively posits a nostalgic space in the past where this symbol of loss did not exist and therefore must have been a happy time: “I’m powerless. I only want one thing. To go back. To go back to where we were” (75). Like Susan, Irwin becomes enraptured with a moment in the past that instead of providing present orientation drives him to reclaim what he has “lost.” Irwin thus deceives himself into forgetting his seduction by Marion’s offer of a doubled salary and the possibility of an affair with Rhonda. Irwin’s self-deception distances him from his own real past: his construction of past happiness/present despair based upon the presence/absence of Isobel mediates Irwin’s perception of reality, making him almost a second-hand observer of his situation.¹⁷ Irwin’s “secret rapture,” whose roots lie in his tender devotion and deference to Isobel, surfaces when it becomes impossible to fulfill. Murdering Isobel becomes the only way for Irwin to end his self-recriminations and thus his secret rapture.

As a title, then, The Secret Rapture is heavily ironic. Hare describes secret rapture as “the moment at which a nun expects to be united with Christ. In other words, it’s death.”¹⁸ The linking of the erotic, “rapture,” and death arises from Christian mysticism, wherein the mystic voids himself or herself in order to experience an unmediated union with some aspect of the divine. Yet within Hare’s work, the secret raptures refer to failed unions: Irwin to Isobel, John Morgan to Karen and later to Jean. The enraptured characters locate in their Christ-equivalents a structuring principle for themselves, someone who can give their lives a method of interpretation and hence meaning.¹⁹ Excepting Susan Traherne, Hare’s enraptured characters lack memories of a period worth faithfulness, filled instead with a sense of continual social and political decline. They substitute a person for the absent orientation. The enraptured cannot stabilize the significations of a person in the same way as events past, making the beloved a continual threat to the enraptured’s entire structure of meaning precisely because she constitutes it but maintains an independent existence. The only means to stabilize the secret rapture then becomes death, where person becomes nostalgic event.

Rapture thus represents an extreme version of the intentionalist morality ascribed to Isobel’s father: individual desire (arising from the gap between the conception and the reality of the beloved) denies the validity of any external or shared good. Enrapturement offers a clearly defined, if twisted, system of validation: recognition from the beloved. In consequence, the enraptured character confronts continual frustration, unable to understand the attraction of other goods or other people’s desires when they do not correspond with his or her own. John Morgan ascribes the incompatibility of goods to a contemporary language that has been drained of words possessing deep conviction:

I only know goodness and anger and revenge and evil and desire … these seem far better words than neurosis and psychology and paranoia. These old words … these good old words have a sort of conviction which all this modern apparatus of language now lacks.

(123, Hare’s ellipses)

For Morgan, these primal emotions cannot find adequate expression in modern speech and find release through violence. However, the violence of the enraptured character does not somehow represent a truer expression of human experience than modern language. Morgan’s failure is not wholly expressive but is interpretive in origin. His violence comes when he cannot understand other people’s actions, when they refuse to fulfill his expectations. Violence represents a suppression of meaningful interaction. Violence silences dissenting voices. Morgan’s speech is thus not strictly accurate: he knows only his goodness, his anger, his revenge, his evil, his desire, and nothing else matters. Roger, also of Wetherby, theorizes that murderers like Morgan are driven by an inability to interact meaningfully with other people, haunted by “theories they only half understand. Informal education. A fantasy life of singular intensity” which cannot find expression. Such people, Roger’s theory goes, “handle other people’s things. In second-hand clothes shops, junk shops, markets” (109). Murderers experience a feeling of linguistic over-mediation, unable to express their thoughts satisfactorily or to interact with people directly, but only “second-hand.” Such characters desire the unmediated intimacy they are incapable of having, accepting no private boundaries as sacrosanct. Irwin’s relief at Isobel’s death arises from a need to alleviate an impossible, forbidden desire for intimacy.

Although neither Irwin’s nor Morgan’s acts are condoned, Morgan’s speech, especially, is never refuted, for Morgan eloquently expresses his longing. Jean Travers identifies with his speech and feels she shares an emptiness of conviction. Like the blackmailer, enraptured characters are so threatening within Hare’s drama because they bear close affinities to characters seeking a moral framework. Morgan’s longing for the “old words” suggests that the language used by contemporary institutions lacks the conviction to offer a meaningful vision for society as a whole. And without shared vision, shared commitment is impossible. The moment of intimacy between Jean and Morgan foregrounds the apparent similarity of a potentially disingenuous nostalgic framework to the over-mediation of the murderer who handles second-hand clothes.

The moment collapses when Morgan inflicts his despair upon Jean, closing any mutual communication. But the break itself does not necessarily validate the nostalgic framework over enrapturement; Hare points out that “goodness [also] can bring out the worst in all of us.”²⁰ This line strikes a chord with Brock’s exasperated, desperate expression of the cost of helping Susan: “You claim to be protecting some personal ideal, always at a cost of almost infinite pain to everyone around you” (Hare, Plenty 199). Susan’s nostalgic rapture bears uncomfortable similarities to Irwin’s and John Morgan’s: each fetishizes the lost “good” to the degree that obtaining it becomes the primary prerogative regardless of the consequences to others. The murderer has a nostalgic framework, an orientation toward a “good” that demands constancy; yet a good-orientation is insufficient for a moral framework. The difference lies in that the murderer’s good assumes a transcendent character for him or her, negating goods of others. Jean and Morgan share a longing, not a vision, and definitely not a moral commitment. Jean, beyond Morgan and even Susan, finds something to which she can commit herself, her students. Although Susan cannot find a similar occupation through which to express her commitment, Hare fairly clearly does not perceive Susan as evil. Her rapture is similar to the others (and even to Thatcherism, which claims to desire a “return” to morals), but Susan differs crucially in that she does not deny history or her responsibilities to those who share that past. John Morgan, Irwin, and Thatcherism all deny actions and promises made in the past, denials that cause the “blankness,” the absence of a moral structuring principle, in pursuit of expediency. Susan never succeeds in performing a good act, but until the end of the play denies a sense of futility, maintaining her commitment to the postwar promise.

Characters who perform evil acts attain a vicious enjoyment from their sense of helplessness and the helplessness they inflict upon others.²¹ John Morgan’s face is almost aglow as he carefully performs his suicide before Jean. Katherine of The Secret Rapture enjoys not only losing control, but also (like Susan Traherne) enjoys describing her loss of control: “When you get angry, they tell you, count to five before you reply. Why should I count to five? It’s what happens before you count to five which makes life interesting” (71). The enjoyment garnered from a loss of control not only arises for characters without a structuring principle but also for characters whose structuring principle stifles independence. Sir Andrew Charleson of Plenty finds a dark pleasure in relating Brock’s vocational demise and his own helplessness against the system: “As our influence wanes, as our empire collapses, there is little to believe in. Behaviour is all” (193). The attempt to instigate meaningful actions, directed by personal belief, is discarded; structuring principles forego their interpretive function and serve simply as disseminators of arbitrary laws adhered to for their own sake, utterly devoid of an orientation toward the good, the vision of a better society. The second half of the epigraph to The Secret Rapture, taken from Rebecca West, highlights the seductiveness of rejecting a moral structuring principle:

The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

Hare’s enraptured characters participate in an anti-mystical experience—deriving erotic satisfaction not from uniting with a transcendent moral structuring principle (the Divine), but from the embrace of nihilism, the pleasure in the “blackened foundations,” and the helpless freedom it offers.²²

Isobel, in contrast, does not find enjoyment in appropriating her father’s structuring principle. She decides, “I must do what Dad would have wished” (Hare, Secret Rapture 69). Isobel’s commitment repudiates her earlier lapse into escapism, her flight to the island paradise Lanzarote.²³ Such inexpedient behavior, further demonstrated in Isobel’s apparent vow not to see Irwin, baffles Marion, whose mimicry of English moral values serves only instrumental ends: “A vow? It’s outrageous. People making vows. What are vows? Nobody’s made vows since the nineteenth century” (63). Isobel not only renounces enjoyment but also self-gain, caring for Katherine regardless of the personal costs: “No., She came my way. It was an accident, really. But I made a commitment. Why should I drop it just because the going gets hard?” (76). This represents one of the few moments of goodness in Hare’s work. Isobel rejects the forms of expediency motivating so many of Hare’s characters, choosing her father’s personal sacrifice. Sacrifice in the name of keeping her commitment finally differentiates Isobel from the other characters and from Thatcherism; she refuses to withdraw into nostalgic enrapturement—making no claim that her father’s sacrifice characterized a transcendent goodness excluding others. Instead, nostalgia defines personal moral obligation, obligations that can be understood and admired by others. Isobel’s longing to be true to the past obliges her to fulfill the promise that began in the past, helping Katherine.

Having determined that good actions are possible from a nostalgic interpretive framework, we are back to the question of morality’s efficacy in the political realm. In a world without an external arbitrator represented in God—a notion rejected in the play’s conclusion when Marion’s businessman-preacher husband Tom says, “I’ve slightly lost touch with the Lord Jesus” (Hare, Secret Rapture 81)—goodness requires positive intervention in the social domain, not simply a theoretical intention or retreat into nostalgia.²⁴ The problem, then, haunting Hare’s more recent works is that if no one else interprets an action as good, if it lacks good results, in what sense is it good? Isobel sacrifices herself, but John Morgan also sacrifices himself in a sense; and if she has not helped Katherine how can the waste of life be justified?

A partial resolution comes through Isobel becoming a nostalgic role model: Isobel’s actions have good ramifications because she herself becomes a nostalgic figure, her sacrifice a guiding principle for others. To Marion’s surprise, the whole village wishes to participate in Isobel’s funeral. The villagers find a common ground in crisis, reminiscent of how men and women during the war came together in response to disaster. The tragic fact of a nostalgic framework is that it forms only in the wake of disaster; the sharpened awareness of orientation comes from a desire to compensate for an irretrievable loss. Through reflecting on the loss of Isobel, Marion finally realizes her own interpretive failure: “It’s all obscure. … I can’t interpret what people feel. … I’ve been angry all my life. Because people’s passions seems so out of control” (Hare, Secret Rapture 81). For Hare, Marion “grows” through Isobel’s death,²⁵ and her refusal at the end of the play to answer the government phone line that has defined her—“She’s just someone who permanently gives off a ringing tone” (14), as Tom puts it—seems promising. Marion’s transformation would represent the ultimate coup. If genuine, then nostalgia can have political agency. The problem of a facile, directionless Left no longer means that voices for genuine social change lack an institutional forum: through retrieving a common history of sacrifice, even the proponents of expediency can change. But Marion’s restoration of her father’s house into a “perfect imitation of life” (81) raises the specter of her earlier mimicry, begging the question whether Marion’s growth is sustainable or will be reincorporated into a framework of expediency, thereby rendering the restoration of the country house simply a more ostentatious version of the ring she gave Robert before he died, a material gift substituting for a feeling that cannot be personally expressed. The intimate moment with Tom is broken off by funeral concerns, and Marion is left alone, caught between the promise of a new beginning for the dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite and a sense of irretrievable loss. The addition, by director Howard Davies in the National Theatre production, of a coda where Isobel’s ghost embraces Marion only incompletely contains the play’s questioning of the efficaciousness of a good action, becoming a sort of deus ex machina to “solidify” nostalgia into a palpable symbol that the body of the play refuses to sustain comfortably.

I would like to thank Enoch Brater, Tobin Siebers, and Ruth Wolbert for their advice and keen insightfulness on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1. David Hare, Plenty in The History Plays: Knuckle, Licking Hitler, and Plenty (London, 1984), 207. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text.

2. David Hare, introduction, The History Plays (London, 1984), 12.

3. Alan Sinfield debates whether the feeling of unity during the war was universal or whether working-class members simply had little alternative. See “War Stories,” in Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley, 1989), 6–220.

4. Quoted by Carol Homden in The Plays of David Hare (Cambridge, 1995), 2.

5. Quoted by Liorah Anne Golomb in “Saint Isobel: David Hare’s The Secret Rapture as Christian Allegory,” Modern Drama, 33 (1990), 572–3.

6. Hare suggests the “elegiac tone” of the British production of The Secret Rapture gave a misrepresentation that “suggested that in some way I yearned for an England of decency that existed before the time of the play.” George Gaston, “Interview: David Hare,” Theatre Journal, 45 (1993), 224. Perhaps the most rancorous critique of Stoppard’s supposed disengagement is in Neil Sammells’s essay, “A Politics of Disengagement” in Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard, ed. Anthony Jenkins (Boston, 1990), 137–46.

7. 7 Quoted in Paul Delaney, Tom Stoppard: the Moral Vision of the Major Plays (New York, 1990), 6.

8. T. S. Eliot, “Christianity and Communism,” Listener, 7 (16 March 1932), 383.

9. David Hare, Racing Demon (London, 1990), 98.

10. David Hare, Licking Hitler in The History Plays (London, 1984), 128. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text.

11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 51.

12. Gaston, 224. See note 6.

13. David Hare, Wetherby in Heading Home, Wetherby and Dreams of Leaving (London, 1991), 84. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

14. Gaston, 224. See note 6.

15. James Gindin makes a similar claim about the homology between Thatcherism and evil in Hare’s work, although more circumspectly, in “Freedom and form in David Hare’s Drama” in British and Irish Drama Since 1960, ed. James Acheson (New York, 1993), 172. Gindin links Thatcherism and evil through the corpse of social liberalism: “Any sense of morality or of spirit is, in The Secret Rapture, defeated by social and institutional perversions … the form of social liberalism has been completely shattered by the evil violence and self-destruction endemic in the human being” (172). The “social and institutional perversions” within Hare’s work arise from the Conservative postwar government.

16. David Hare, The Secret Rapture (New York, 1989), 11. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

17. If we accept that memory mediates between a person and his/her past, then self-deception creates an additional layer over the repressed memories, thus making the person doubly mediated or “over-mediated.”

18. Quoted by Golomb, 571. See note 5.

19. Christianity consciously refers to Jesus Christ as embodying a structuring principle: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John, 14:6). By implication, loss of such a principle results in an interpretive failure, as suggested earlier, a loss of meaning.

20. David Hare, Writing Left-Handed (London, 1991), 159.

21. I use “enjoyment” here in the sense Slavoj Zizek uses it, to refer to “the thrill of entering a forbidden domain.” Zizek’s term tends to be associated with the surrender to the impulses of the superego, the displeasure received in renouncing one’s agency, as the diplomats of Plenty do. Unlike the Freudian superego as conscience, Zizek describes it as the “obscene reverse of law.” See his For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London, 1991), esp. 233–45.

22. Hare, in an interview, links nihilism to a form of dangerous and unsatisfying freedom. See “An Interview with David Hare,” Hersh Zeifman, David Hare: A Casebook (New York, 1994), 10.

23. Isobel’s return seems a tacit attack on the escapist nostalgia Susan Traherne embodies in her lover, Lazar: Lanzarote without the “n” and “ote” spells Lazar. Whereas Susan seeks to retreat to the past, so much defined by her lover, Isobel denies such disengagement.

24. Given that the only Christian representative in The Secret Rapture is Tom, who lacks any solid conviction, I must disagree with Golomb’s view that the play is a Christian allegory. Hare, both in The Secret Rapture and Racing Demon, seems quite critical of institutional Christianity in that it effaces personal responsibility and obligation to the present social realm. The impersonal language of Isobel’s criticism of Irwin, “You want to be saved through another person” (76) suggests an implicit attack on Christianity, which insists upon salvation through another person, Jesus Christ.

25. Gaston, 223. See note 6.