The David Hare election roadshow confounds the critics
Sunday, May 16th, 2010Say what you like about Sir David Hare or just plain David Hare (but not, please, “Call me Dave”). And some people have been very mean indeed - step forward, most notoriously Dominic Dromgoole (“The most intriguing question about David Hare is how such a flat writer has come to be afforded such a mountainous reputation”, The Full Room, An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting). Say what you like about him, though, but it’s safe to declare that he’s had a good month…
The Sheffield Crucible, under Daniel Evans, has announced a retrospective season dedicated to his work for February 2011, which follows much in the mould of the Pinter festival that Samuel West organised during his aegis: at the end of this splurge of activity, from main-house productions to workshops, no one in Sheffield will have any excuse not to know more than the national average about the man. And if he fails to win any converts I’d be very surprised. True, I raise my eyebrows at the principal selection of plays chosen for revivals - Racing Demon, the first of the so-called Hare Trilogy is, beyond doubt, a modern classic; Plenty is one of those plays that “matters” but doesn’t to my mind live up to the praise heaped on it. And having sat through the effortful The Breath of Life when it premiered in the West End, I can’t for the life, or breath, of me understand why it has been chosen to showcase his talents - surely, Skylight, The Permanent Way or The Vertical Hour would make a stronger impression.
Still why rain on this parade when any kind of sustained evaluation is to be welcomed? If one agrees at least with Dromgoole that Hare has a “mountainous reputation”, it’s only fitting that prominent players in British theatre get together to explore how that reputation has been arrived at and what the nature of Hare’s contribution is. We had a go at this subject on theatrevoice some time back - in a special public session as part of the Reputations strand, and one of the most immediate conclusions I arrived at, preparing to host that session, was that (and Dromgoole’s assessment doesn’t do this justice), Hare has, if nothing else, written an impressive amount in his time.
If academics are snooty about him, as Richard Boon, who took part in the discussion, suggested, then the joke’s on them - because the centrality of Hare’s position in relation both to theatre culture and the wider political culture demands detailed examination.
The Power of Yes, we may already be seeing, has been too swiftly patted on the head. Where Enron crashed in New York I have a hunch that its straight-down-the-line, up-to-speed, reportage-based rival would likely have prospered. For the incidental record, I’ve only ever heard acquaintances with inside knowledge of the banking sector praise The Power of Yes, and express irritation with Enron. That’s not to say that Enron hasn’t deserved the fat-cat bonus of encouragement it received here, but one suspects The Power of Yes was too cursorily dismissed by some, on account not least of their suspicion about Hare’s own fat-cat success.
Time will tell which of the two is more cited, and useful, when we look back on the financial meltdown of 08/09. In the mean while, I suspect there’s already a new play cooking about the seismic shift, or not, in our political landscape. I’d actually put money on it, though, as Hare reminded us in his prolific Guardian dispatches from the election trail, this was the month when all bets were off. In a fit of pessimism, he put £20 on an outright Tory victory.
“Flat writing” was there none in his reportage which ranked, I thought, with the best of Fleet Street’s political sketch-writers - as funny and observant as Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail, as sure-footed in his wry deconstruction as The Independent’s Simon Carr.
One-liners? He had ‘em… “A Future Fair For All already sounds like the Act One closer to one of those legendarily short-lived West End musicals”. Those kind of nods to theatre were kept on a firm leash, but let loose when appropriate viz, succinctly: “The two butchers of Broadway, Cameron and Brown, are telling anyone who will listen that Clegg has grown over-confident in the role. And what’s more, they are admitting that it worries them sick. What do critics know? The performance is going down a storm with the public.” Some of the asides were so sharp, you wonder why Hare doesn’t do Twitter. He‘d be up there with Fry: “And, further, what on earth is Cameron up to? New-model policies are taken out daily from the showroom and not even test-driven to the nearest traffic lights before being consigned to the metal crusher.” Or “the loudest sound was of Margaret Thatcher’s body being thrown out the back of the truck and left for roadkill.” He covered the physical terrain with a marginal constituency canvasser’s remorseless energy. He was, yes, hare-like.
Enough, I hear you say, of all this adulation! OK, enough. But as Linda says in Death of a Salesman - “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
