David Hare: A Casebook ed. by Hersh Zeifman (review)

Book Reviews 227 HERSH ZEIFMAN, ed. David Hare: A Casebook. New York and London: Garland 1994. Pp. xxiii, 254. $42.00. David Hare has been writing for nearly thirty years, yet has had far less attention than such contemporaries as Pinter and Stoppard, perhaps because his subject is often the Condition of England. Zeifman's collection contains an interview, an adequate bibliography . three general essays and nine which between them survey sixteen of Hare's works. Omissions include A Map o/the World, the first drama in which Hare broadened his subject from England to the world; the enigmatic film, Wetherby; the collaborations wilh Howard Brenton; and the television pieces, "Dreams of Leaving" and "Heading Home," where mcn VS. women (not quite, the sex war) almost exclude the politics. As Hare, after a short apprenticeship on the fringe, has written variously for the . touring Joint Stock, for the Royal Court, and for all three auditoria of the National The~ atre, a context would have been useful. Hare's cricket-and~public~school Englishness gives some problems to the mostly Nonh American contributions: for example, Ruby Cohn refers 10 "the Cambridge May Ball" in Teeth'n'Smiles when the ball is at Jesus College, one of several cOlleges having their own ball during May Week; Raymond Williams, Robert Hewison, and four other men are awkwardly put together as "Leftist intellectuals" by Finlay Donesky. Some essayists, on the credit side, show a sense of the scripts in perfonnance. John Russell Brown points out how Isabel in The Secret Rapture re-entered at the end on stage but not in the text. while John Bull shows how the movie PlenTy diminished the stage play by turning it into "Susan's story rather than England's." Especially, Lane Glenn has theatrical impact centre stage in his account of the National Theatre trilogy of 199--93. All the essays are sensible, infonned and balanced, largely avoiding fashionable theory and vocabulary - the footnoting of Kenneth Burke and use of "hegemony" actually stood out. I rated the following nine quite highly. Brown's thinking, pioneering and suggestive , attempts to bring out how Hare's experiences of film technique have come to influence his stage plays. Bull, writing with full understanding of political theatre and society in Britain, shows how the couple in Licking Hitler are "class enemies theoretically fighting on the same side." Donesky skilfully puts Knuckle and Teeth'n'Smiles in the context of the governments of Heath and Callaghan, and of late-Sixties popular culture (though the use of the thriller genre in Knuckle needs attention). He engages with Hare on politics, as the dramatist surely wants. even if he's finally unfair to what Hare presents. Glenn's placing of the trilogy is particularly good at exposing the flaws of Murmuring Judges and limited only,by his failure to set The Absence of War precisely enough against the facts of the 1992 British election campaign. Janelle Reinelt looks at FallShen as perhaps Brechtian, finding this "the most exemplary epic play of his generation." Toby Zinman cautiously introduces Saigon, with comparisons with other accounts of Vietnam and the conclusion that Frederick Forrest 228 Book Reviews marred the piece with "Old Hollywood" acting. Zinman states that Saigon has not been seen in Canada; eBC screened it on 27 April 1984. As I found The Bay at Nice and Wrecked Eggs empty or puzzling, Anthony Jenkins's painstaking exposition was helpful . He demonstrates that they reveal "how the pursuit of individualism destroys the common good." Anne Nothof gives a sound account of good women in three works, though the woman is on the edge of Racing Demon and at the heart of The Secret Rapture and Strapless - the impact of the latter on screen is unfortunately squeezed into her last paragraph. Ann Wilson discusses Racing Demon intelligently, though she misses the way Hare is documenting division in the Church and how - given the tradition that the Church of England is the Tory Party at prayer - any social criticism from clerics was remarkable. Less successful essays come from Cohn, who finds space largely for plot summary in studying Hare's women; Robert L. King, who tries to draw...