David Hare
born June 5, 1947, St. Leonards, Sussex,
Eng.
British playwright and director, noted for
his deftly crafted satires examining British
society in the post-World War II era.
Hare graduated from Jesus College,
Cambridge, in 1968 and founded an
experimental touring theatre group that same
year. He directed some of its productions
and soon began writing plays for the group,
including Slag (1970). With The Great
Exhibition (1972) and Knuckle (1974) Hare
established himself as a talented playwright
and a vigorous critic of the dubious mores
of British public life. Teeth ’n’ Smiles
(1975) examined the milieu of rock
musicians, while the widely praised play
Plenty (1978) was a searching study of the
erosion of a woman’s personality,
metaphorically evoking Britain’s
contemporaneous postwar decline. He
continued to direct productions at various
London theatres during the 1970s and ’80s.
Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (1985), a play
about newspaper tycoons coauthored with
Howard Brenton, was the first of a series of
plays castigating British institutions. It
was followed by Racing Demon (1990), about
the Church of England; Murmuring Judges
(1991), about the legal profession; and The
Absence of War (1993), about politicians.
The Blue Room (1998) was an adaptation of
Merry-Go-Round by the Austrian playwright
Arthur Schnitzler. It follows the partnering
of 10 pairs of lovers, each vignette
featuring one character that appeared in the
last. Hare’s subsequent plays include Stuff
Happens (2004), which follows U.S. Pres.
George W. Bush and his advisers in the
run-up to the Iraq War, and The Power of Yes
(2009), the playwright’s attempt, via staged
“interviews,” to understand the 2008
financial crisis.
Hare became known as a screenwriter for
his film adaptation of Plenty in 1985. He
also adapted The Secret Rapture (1988), his
play exploring the complex relationship
between two sisters, for film in 1994. Hare
wrote several plays for television and wrote
and directed the films Wetherby (1985) and
Strapless (1989). His screenplay adaptations
of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours and
Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (released 2002
and 2008, respectively) were nominated for
Academy Awards. He was knighted in 1998.
