David Hare – författare

This version of Brecht's great anti-war play by playwright David Hare was premiered by the National Theatre, London, in November 1995. It adopts a freer approach to the text than many editions, adapting the original rather than offering a close translation. In this chronicle of the Thirty Years War, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part with her livelihood - the wagon. The Berlin production of 1949, with Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, marked the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble. Considered by many to be one of the greatest anti-war plays ever written and Brecht's masterpiece, it remains a powerful example of Brecht's Epic Theatre and pioneering theatrical style.

This adaptation by David Hare premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London in 1997 starring Ralph Fiennes This is a drama of a Russian landowner's half-farcical, half serious personal crisis as he plummets fast into domestic and philosophical chaos. The central scene concerns a debate between the landowner and the young doctor about honesty. The latter thinks that honesty is to do with blurting out offensive truths, whilst the former insists that no-one can acquire honesty unless they have the self knowledge to examine their own motives. By turns despairing and passionate, this play offers an insight into a robust young writer, exploring themes that were to interest him in his later plays.

How do you fight without hate?Racing Demon reveals the struggle of four clergymen to make sense of their mission. David Hare's play opened at the National Theatre, London, in 1990 to universal acclaim, and won four awards as Play of the Year. Racing Demon was the first part of David Hare's trilogy of plays about British institutions; Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War completed the trilogy.

David Hare's trilogy of plays - Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War - first presented at the National Theatre, London, in 1993, examines the crises facing three great British institutions - the Church, the Law and the Labour Party. In order to learn about these organisations, Hare amassed a body of hard research from first-hand interviews with many of the people involved: from vicars to high-ranking policemen, from judges to MPs. Asking Around presents a judicious selection of those interviews and also includes a commentary by Hare, describing how he threaded his way through the complex structures of Church, Law and Politics.

A young lawyer's involvement in her first case leads her through a criminal justice system - police, courts and prisons - which is cracking at the seams.Murmuring Judges is the second play in David Hare's highly acclaimed trilogy about British institutions. Racing Demon, which won four awards as Play of the Year in 1990, was the first part of the trilogy and examined the Church. The Absence of War, a play about the Labour Party, completed the trilogy.

This first volume of David Hare's plays contains his work from the 1970s, including his landmark play of that decade, Plenty, charting the development of 'one of the great post-war British playwrights' (Independent on Sunday).The volume also includes the plays Slag, Teeth 'n' Smiles, Knuckle and Licking Hitler, and is introduced by the author.

This second volume of plays by David Hare contains work from the 1970s and 1980s which confirmed him as one of the major contemporary playwrights in the English language. It includes Fanshen, his remarkable 1975 play which focused on the Chinese Revolution with Brechtian subtlety, his screenplay for Saigon: Year of the Cat, The Secret Rapture, his biting portrait of a family in crisis, and the plays A Map of the World and The Bay at Nice. The collection is introduced by the author.

It is 1979. Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her young daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend sets in train a series of events which only find their shape eighteen years later. A generational play about the long term struggle between a strong mother and her loving daughter, Amy's View mixes love, death and the theatre in a way which is both heady and original.

'My whole life, it's been assumed, Western civilisation is an old bitch gone in the teeth. And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, they're fighting for something they believe in.' Via Dolorosa. In 1997, after many invitations, the 50-year-old British playwright resolved finally to visit the 50-year-old State of Israel. The resulting play, written to be performed by the author himself, offers a meditation on an extraordinary trip to both Israel and the Palestinian territory, which leaves Hare questioning his own values as searchingly as the powerful beliefs of those he met. Accompanying Via Dolorosa is the 1996 lecture When Shall We Live?, which also addresses questions of art and faith. Originally given in Westminster Abbey as the Eric Symes Memorial Lecture, it attracted record correspondence when an abridged version was published in the Daily Telegraph.

Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as 'completely unprintable'. The company that first presented them was prosecuted for obscenity in 1921. It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has re-set these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day. Using as much imaginative freedom in his turn as Ophuls did fifty years ago, and with just two actors playing all of the parts, Hare has created a fascinating landscape of dream and longing which seems both eternal and bang-up-to-date.

In 1997 the 50-year-old playwright David Hare decided to visit the 50-year-old state of Israel and write a play - Via Dolorosa - about the conflict. He then chose to become the actor of his own play and set about learning to act the monologue for an uninterrupted 95 minutes on stage. Acting Up is a diary of the ups and downs of that learning curve as well as an insight into what it is actors, directors, producers and stage staff actually do in rehearsals. Hare's hilarious diary of his experience on both sides of the Atlantic tells of his difficulties in coming to terms with his terrifying change of career, but also grapples with more serious questions about the nature of acting itself.

The Hours is David Hare's screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In Richmond, England in 1923, Virginia Woolf is setting out to write the first words of her new book. In Los Angeles in 1951, a housewife, Laura Brown, is contemplating suicide. And in present-day New York, a hostess, Clarissa Vaughan, is planning a party for her friends. In extraordinary and ingenious ways, the film shows how a single day - and the novel Mrs Dalloway - inextricably link the lives of three very different women.

'Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.'Gauguin's aphorism serves as the motto for this morality tale of two women, both in their sixties, whose lives are interwoven in ways neither of them yet understand. Madeline Palmer is a retired curator, living alone on the Isle of Wight. One day to her door comes Angela Beale, a woman she has met only once, who is now enjoying sudden success, late in life, as a popular novelist. The progress of a single night comes fascinatingly to echo the hidden course of their lives.

"Stuff happens premiered at the National Theatre, London, in September 2004"--P. [4] of cover.

Stuff happens... And it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.'The famous response of American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the looting of Baghdad at a press conference in 2003 provides the title for David Hare's play about the extraordinary process leading up to the invasion of Iraq.Stuff Happens premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2004 and has subsequently been performed around the world.'Stuff Happens may make you openly boo, hiss, cheer or even cry, but it will also remind you why this 2,500 year-old art form remains the best way for human beings to collectively experience and contemplate the effects of war.' Los Angeles Times'A totally compelling play that ruthlessly exposes the dubious premises on which the Iraq war was fought... One comes out enriched, informed and moved by Hare's ability to turn recent politics into historical drama.' Guardian

This is a new collection of some of David Hare's finest work, including Skylight (Winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, 1996), Amy's View, The Judas Kiss and My Zinc Bed.

Berlin/WallIn two contrasted readings for the stage, David Hare visits a place where a famous wall has come down; then another where a wall is going up.BerlinFor his whole adult life, David Hare has been visiting the city which so many young people regard as the most exciting in Europe. But there's something in Berlin's elusive character that makes him feel he's always missing the point. Now, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the reunification, he offers a meditation about Germany's restored capital - both what it represents in European history, and the peculiar part it has played in his own life.WallThe Israeli/Palestine security fence will one day stretch 486 miles, from one end of Israel to the other. It will be four times as long as the Berlin wall, and in places twice as high. In this second monologue, the playwright recalls his trips to both Israel and the Palestinian territory and offers a history of the wall's building, an exploration of the philosophy behind it and a personal account of those who live on either side. Berlin premiered at the National Theatre, London, in February 2009 and Wall premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in March 2009.

1962: A public school on the South Downs.John Blakemore is a solitary boy who finds it impossible either to understand or adapt to the ways of the school. His adolescent earnestness put off teacher and pupil alike. And now suddenly he seems to be in danger of losing his only friend.David Hare's emotional new play, written at the invitation of the Rattigan estate as a response to The Browning Version, is a meditation on faith, learning and teenage friendship, played against the backdrop of a Britain still fighting to maintain an established rule.Collected with South Downs is the text of Hare's lecture Mere Fact, Mere Fiction, delivered to the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. In a famous defence of documentary theatre, the author celebrates the power of metaphor to transform factual quite as much as fictional material.

When, in 2000, the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. Yet he was born in 1947 into an anonymous suburban street in Hastings. It is a world he believes to be as completely vanished as Victorian England.Now in his first panoramic work of memoir, ending as Margaret Thatcher comes to power in 1979, David Hare describes his childhood, his Anglo-Catholic education and his painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist. He sets the progress of his own life against the history of a time in which faith in hierarchy, deference, religion, the empire and finally politics all withered away. Only belief in private virtue remains.In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humour, David Hare explores how so radical a shift could have occurred, and how it is reflected in his own lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms - film and theatre. In The Blue Touch Paper David Hare describes a life of trial and error: both how he became a writer and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.

Oscar Wilde's philosophy leads him on a path to destruction. The Judas Kiss describes two pivotal moments: the day Wilde decides to stay in England and face imprisonment, and the night when the lover for whom he risked everything betrays him.With a burning sense of outrage, David Hare presents the consequences of an uncompromisingly moral position in a world defined by fear and conformity.Originally produced in the West End and on Broadway, this new edition coincides with a 2012 revival.'Superbly written... Hare has taken a history and pieced it together with heroic grace... Vastly rich, sophisticated and heartbreaking.' Time Out, New York

He's not like what you'd call rational-articulate. He doesn't want argument. For Christ's sake, Kyra, you teach. Language belongs to the past. This is the world of Super Mario. Bang! Splat! Spit out your venom and go. It's not like, you know . . . when we were together. You and me talking. Talking down the stars from the sky.Skylight premiered at the National Theatre, London, 1995. It won an Olivier Award for Play of the Year; and an Evening Standard Award for Revival of the Year, 2014.'There are times in the theatre when you suddenly find yourself in the grip of silence. There is no fidgeting or coughing, no shifting about in seats: the audience's attention is so tense it is almost palpable. This is because it is both thrilling and dangerous: a fight to the death, or the dawning of salvation. David Hare's Skylight is punctuated by such moments. They are the signs that a dramatist of the first rank is writing at full stretch, in complete command of his material, undogmatic and unafraid, unforgiving and compassionate.' Sunday Times

The Absence of War offers a meditation on the classic problems of leadership, and is the third part of a critically acclaimed trilogy of plays (Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges) about British institutions.Its unsparing portrait of a Labour Party torn between past principles and future prosperity, and of a deeply sympathetic leader doomed to failure, made the play hugely controversial and prophetic when it was first presented at the National Theatre, London, in 1993.The Absence of War is much more than a piece of skilled reporting. It is actually cast as a classic tragedy.' Guardian

The change will come. And it's not far away, I promise you that. Some figure will emerge from the dark screaming 'Get out of the way'. And not far behind others will follow... The young are waiting. In all their power. Knocking on the door.The master builder Halvard Solness has a fear of falling. A self-made man, without professional qualifications, he has achieved domination in the town but he's increasingly frightened of being displaced by the young. A woman, Hilde Wangel, appears from the mountains, claiming to have known Solness ten years previously, and telling him of a promise he made to her when she thirteen.David Hare has written a new adaptation of one of Henrik Ibsen's most complex autobiographical masterpieces - a mesmeric exploration of control, power, lust and death, which builds to a vertiginous climax.The Master Builder premiered in this English version at The Old Vic, London, in January 2016.

Connecticut, 1969. On their way back from a party, two couples struggle home through thesnow. Not everyone arrives safely.The great detective writer Georges Simenon escaped France at the end of World War Two, and arrived in the USA to start again. With his American wife, he settled at Shadow Rock Farm in Lakeville.Years later, he wrote La Main, a psychological thriller set in a New England farmhouse. David Hare has taken this novel, and forged from it a startling new play. The Red Barn premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2016.

After opening to sometimes bewildered reviews at the National Theatre in 1978, David Hare's wildly ambitious play Plenty established itself as a landmark modern classic in its 1982 New York production, which transferred to Broadway with Kate Nelligan playing Susan Traherne.Counterpointing the experiences of a fiercely intelligent Englishwoman flown into France as a secret agent during the Second World War with her life in the following twenty years, David Hare offers a unique view of post-war history, as well as making a powerful statement about changing values and the collapse of ideals embodied in a single life.'The richest, certainly the most resonant experience of my theatrical year.' Clive Barnes, Sunday Times'An explosive theatrical version of a world that was won and lost during and after World War II.' Frank Rich, New York TimesPlenty was made into a film from a screenplay by David Hare with Meryl Streep, Charles Dance and John Gielgud. Plenty returned to The Public, New York, in October 2016 with Susan Traherne played by Rachel Weisz.