David Hare has been one of the most visible bricks in the imposing wall of British theatre since he broke through, in 1970, with Slag. His jeremiads about the collapsing state of England and his rants about social justice have been delivered in such varied and successful plays as Plenty (1978), an attack on the corruption of the upper classes; Pravda (1985, with Howard Brenton), an attack on the tabloid press; Racing Demon (1990), to my mind his best play, which attacked the entropy of the Anglican Church: and, most recently, the award-winning Skylight—currently at the Royale Theatre, on Broadway, for a limited engagement—which attacks just about everything else. Here Hare’s invective (“I’m tired of these right-wing fuckers,” one excellent tirade begins) makes him, as Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian, put it, “John Osborne’s natural heir.” (Hare himself says that Look Back in Anger “is the modern play I’d most like to have written.”) The comparison is wrong but relevant. Osborne was a reactionary brawler—reckless, bullying, as capable of the low blow as of the precision punch—who could rarely go the distance. Hare, who is more of a technician, is a slick, smart, guarded, and progressive in-fighter, his jabs are accurate. If not always memorable, and he never risks the vulgarity of an intemperate explosion. This is why he wins more of his theatrical battles. Osborne, at his best, writes like a bad boy; Hare writes like a Head Boy—articulate, forthright, mature beyond his years, alternately severe and supercilious. He’s a model of good form. Not surprisingly, he holds the record for having the most plays produced (ten) in the history of the Royal National Theatre, whose director, Richard Eyre, expertly directs Skylight. But Hare’s success and his social conscience are at odds: they put him in a moral quandary that is at the center of both The Secret Rapture (1988) and Skylight—plays that, each in its own way, struggle with the dichotomy of being big and being good.

In Skylight, the entrepreneur Tom Sergeant is big (public company, limousine, island retreat); Kyra Hollis, his beloved former mistress, is good (she has given up the lush life to teach the underprivileged in a “comprehensive” East Ham high school). Hare puts them toe to toe onstage and shows us how comfort and conscience don’t live happily together. Yet for all his eloquence he doesn’t have a storyteller’s love of texture and the mysterious idiosyncrasies of character. His dramas are really essays with legs, and the characters are stick figures for his ideas. They set out a hypothesis and then elegantly argue the pros and cons to a progressive conclusion. As a 1991 collection of his journalism, Writing Left-Handed, shows, Hare is a pedestrian, somewhat pompous essayist; in his plays, however, and in the mouths of fine performers, the whopping, opinionated arias he writes lose a good half of their immodesty and sanctimony. Often, the charisma of outstanding performers—over the years, his plays have starred, among others, Helen Mirren, Kate Nelligan, and Anthony Hopkins—distracts from Hare’s inert exposition and makes talk feel like action. This is decidedly the case in Skylight, where we have both the inimitable Michael Gambon, playing the entrepreneur Tom Sergeant, a grief-stricken widower, and the powerful, appealing Lia Williams, playing Kyra Hollis, into whose life he crashes back one wintry London night in the nineties.

John Gunter’s set, like the play itself, seems caught between naturalism and symbolism. It’s a well-appointed, ramshackle main room, dominated by a behemoth upstage wall/window (whose like would not be found anywhere in the fashionable but dowdy area of Northwest London where the play is set), through which the gray, barren outlines of the city can be seen. The incongruity of the transparent wall reinforces the notion that Kyra’s book-lined first-floor flat, with its up-market “working surfaces” and down-market decoration, is some interior garret of Hare’s exacting imagination. (Even the downstage garbage is politically correct: divided into glass and paper, it signals the home of a liberal, responsible citizen.) Kyra, whose name echoes “Kyrie”—a call for mercy—is just that. “My goodness” are her first words. Although it’s an exclamation directed at Edward Sergeant (Christian Camargo), Tom’s eighteen-year-old son—whom she hasn’t seen for a few years, and who walks into her house unannounced—the words subliminally establish the moral stakes in this puppet show of passion. Edward brings news of his rebellion, his mother’s death from cancer, and his father’s weird behavior during a year of mourning, and he asks the question whose answer Hare spends the next two hours telling but not showing. “We saw you for years,” Edward says to Kyra. “Then you vanished. Why?”

As soon as Edward exits, Tom Sergeant is produced as glibly as Edward was. Tom is shrouded in a black raincoat, which he won’t remove, and his loneliness is as vast and dark as the coat around him. He hasn’t seen Kyra for three years, since his wife discovered their six-year affair. He wants to be embraced, but he cannot embrace Kyra’s life style. “This is the life that you made?” he says at the end of Act I, when it appears to both of them that they might come back together. “Will you tell me, will you tell me, please, Kyra, what exactly you’re doing here?” Tom and Kyra are separated not by love but by ideology, and Michael Gambon fills the play’s formulaic plot with the compelling gravity of his booming, inconsolable presence. He enters carrying an offering of whiskey; she puts it with the beer. Starting with this first gesture, the differences between the would-be lovers are factored out as systematically as an algebraic equation. He is wasteful, well dressed, successful, ironic; she is responsible, casual, impecunious, sincere. In her self-sacrifice, she is also “spiritual,” while that “bloody word ‘spiritual’” is one that he can’t abide. “It means, Well for me, for me this is terribly important, but I’m fucked if I can really say why,’” Tom says, on a winning, splenetic roll, as he prowls around Kyra’s lacquered red kitchen table. As we see, Kyra is a good listener; but to Tom “listening’s halfway to begging.” In his restless energy—Gambon is a dynamo of ironic feints and charming nervous tics—Tom, whose entrepreneurial talent has made him a wealthy restaurateur, personifies the Thatcher boom years. “Just through that little opening in history you could feel the current,” he tells Kyra. “For once you could feel the current running your way. You walked into a bank, you went in there, you had an idea. In, Money. Thank you. Out.”

Kyra, who once worked in Tom’s restaurant and said no to an offer of the shares that made Tom a millionaire when his business went public, personifies the rejection of the free-market spirit. “The whole of society must get down on their knees and thank them, because they do something they no longer call ‘making money,’” she says when it’s her turn to serve for the match. “Now we must call it something much nicer. Now we must call it ‘the creation of wealth.’” Kyra gives as good as she gets: “If you actually have to learn to survive, well, it’s a thousand times harder than leading an export drive, being in government, or … yes, I have to say, it’s even harder than running a bank.” Hare’s dialogue fairly crackles with vitriol; and Gambon, especially, makes the observations pay. “I’m deeply impressed with it,” he says of Kyra’s flat. “It gives me no problem at all. Put a bucket in the corner to shit in, and you can take hostages and tell them this is Beirut!” When Tom’s needling doesn’t get a response, he loses control and, in the play’s best moment, heaves her students’ notebooks around the room and at her. He makes a last-ditch promise to give Kyra a family, but they both know they’ve missed their moment. “The energy’s wonderful. Oh God, I tell you the energy’s what everyone needs,” she says to him before he exits, defeated, into the snowy early morning. “But with the energy comes the restlessness. And I can’t live in that way.”

After Tom closes the door on his dream of love, the lights fade on the exhausted Kyra as she straggles to bed. The audience, which has listened with rapt attention, applauds. The play feels over—and, indeed, it is. But Hare adds a forced grace note—a commercial theatrical compromise masquerading as a kind of spiritual consolation. Kyra, who admitted to Edward in the first scene that what she missed from her old deluxe life was “a good breakfast,” has an haut-bourgeois blessing literally spread out before her. At seven o’clock the next morning, just as she’s racing off to school to give special help to one of the few gifted students, Edward arrives with breakfast from the Ritz. Kyra wakes up and smells the coffee. Here on Broadway, at fifty-five dollars a head, it’s in a silver service. “Let’s eat” are Kyra’s last words. The lights fade on a banquet—Hare’s romantic tribute—where idealism and materialism cozy up together. “Nobody lives an honest life, do they?” Hare has said, and certainly his ending, which panders to the customers, proves the point. In Skylight Hare, I suspect, has his Broadway hit; he also has an unwitting metaphor of the winded, nervous British political moment. Skylight, finally, is a socialist soap opera in which, as in Tony Blair’s new Labour, the socialism is left out.