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By Susan Emerling

Dec. 7, 1999

Have you noticed? It's always the death of the theater. The death of the novel. The death of poetry. The death of whatever they fancy this week. Except there's one thing it's never the death of. Somehow it's never the death of themselves ... The death of television! The death of the journalist! Why do we never get those? It's off to the scaffold with everyone except for the journalists!"
--"Amy's View"

If the theater is dead, what was all the noise last spring about people not being able to get tickets to "Amy's View" or "The Blue Room"? Indeed, you'd have to drive a stake through playwright David Hare's heart to truly put an end to the theater. Otherwise Hare would keep on doing what he has been doing for the last 30 years: setting loose complexly conflicted characters caught in sparkling irresolvable dramas that grapple with the questions, "How do we change the world? And if we cannot change the world, how can we live in the world as we find it?"

Routinely referred to as one of Britain's leading playwrights (along with Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard), David Hare, who had four new plays on Broadway in a 12-month period, is so prolific that he may have to slow down to let his audience catch up with him. At best count, Hare has written 22 plays, many of which he directed, including "Plenty," "Racing Demon," "Skylight," "Amy's View," "The Blue Room" and "The Judas Kiss." He's also written seven feature films (including the adaptation of "Damage" directed by Louis Malle), as well as five produced teleplays, two books and various other projects.

Hare's plays are bitingly funny and politically engaged. They favor the left, but often create equally compelling portraits of the right. They're also very different from what has been passing for theater in America for all but the last few years (in which serious drama has finally begun to compete with, and at times outsell, the razzle-dazzle musicals). Among the performers who've appeared in his works are Nicole Kidman, Liam Neeson, Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Gambon, Meryl Streep and Judi Dench -- who was a Hare regular long before Americans discovered her and showered her with awards for even the briefest of screen appearances.

In 1998, Hare became an actor himself, something he hadn't attempted since he was 15. The vehicle for his "return" to the stage was "Via Dolorosa," a one-man play about the present state of the state of Israel, written after a trip to the Middle East to research a play about the British Mandate. When I spoke with him in New York recently, Hare said that "Via Dolorosa" is meant for people who think they know something about the Middle East, but who don't know the full complexity of the situation. And not to know the full complexity is not to know the debate at all.

"Via Dolorosa" is a testimony to the conflicting voices and beliefs -- not just the familiar Arab vs. Jew, but the equally intense Jew vs. Jew and Arab vs. Arab -- buffeting a far-off land very different from Hare's homeland. In England, Hare says in "Via Dolorosa," "people lead shallow lives, because they don't believe in anything anymore." Not so in Israel, a country where one experiences in a day "events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year."

Acting in "Via Dolorosa" was much more arduous than Hare had anticipated. Confronted with the unfamiliar conventions of getting onstage each evening, he grounded himself in the familiar conventions of writing each morning, producing a diary that has just been published by Faber & Faber under the slightly rebellious title "Acting Up." (Hare's preferred title would have been "My Wife Is George Bush," but his publishers convinced him that this would have been a cataloguing nightmare. Do you file it under politics? or transsexuality?)

Hare sees "Acting Up" as a defense of theater at a time when it has been accused of being elitist. He believes theater has an ability to communicate in a way no other medium can, and he's most gratified by the heated debates that filled the lobby after performances of "Via Dolorosa." "Acting Up" is also a funny day-to-day chronicle of what it's like to perform onstage in front of a live audience, by somebody very much at the heart of contemporary theater. Hare marvels at how Judi Dench can rally the troops before heading onstage with "OK, let's move them," or how Kevin Spacey hits the boards as if it were a football field with "Let's go out there and kick some ass."

Whatever indignities Hare suffers as an actor, nothing compares with the crawling-in-the-stalls agonies of a playwright sitting with the audience watching his own work, a torture he has endured since 1969, when he was 22. His writing career began accidentally -- "with a typewriter on my knees, while traveling in a van with an itinerant theatre group Tony Bicåt and I had founded called Portable Theatre," a leading force in Britain's fringe theater movement -- when a playwright failed to deliver a play for a performance four days hence. In an interview with his Faber & Faber editors, published as a foreword to the first volume of his collected plays, Hare recalls, "The piece was as silly as you'd expect of something concocted in four days by someone who'd never really thought about writing a play before. It was a primitive satire on the unlikelihood of revolution in Britain."

What was clear even then, however, was that David Hare could write dialogue, which is "as essential a skill for a playwright as rendering hands and feet is for a painter," he says. Immediately commissioned to write a full-length play, "Slag," a satire about life in an all-female community inspired by feminism and Germaine Greer's recently published "The Female Eunuch," Hare won the Evening Standard Drama Award for most promising new playwright. He quickly followed up with three more satires capitalizing on the "democratizing elements of public laughter."

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