The Common Good: The Hare Trilogy

The Common Good: The Hare Trilogy DAVID PATTIE The one thing I have learnt and understood from five years' study is that British society needs not to abolish its institutions, bUl to refresh them. For, if not through institulions. how do we express the common good?1 In 1987, David Hare attended the Church of England's General Synod, "with no other motive but curiosity"; as he later put it, he "had the vague suspicion that priests pretending to be politicians might present [him] with an entertaining spectacle.,,2The visit, however, proved to be very much more than merely entertaining; it provided the impetus for a large-scale project that would occupy him for the next five years - a trilogy of plays (Racing Demon. which dealt with the Church; Murmurillg Judges, on the British legal system; and The Absence of War, which assessed the electoral performance of the Labour Party). The trilogy examined the impact of Thatcherite policies on the institutionallife of the country: A friend of mine remarked that it was my special good fortune to have completed a trilogy about British institutions at precisely that moment when British institutions were finally admiued to be in a state of collapse. I. of course. would maintain that it was not chance. A playwright above all other writers responds unknowingly to the mood of the times. But, more than this, my intention in the plays was never to theorize about the overall state of my three institutions. IL has been much more to portray the lives of the people rrying to survive in them. At a moment in our history when Conservat·ive governments have been trying to force dramatic changes on this country, I did feel some special sympathy for those luckless people who were charged with the enforcement of those changes, or, perhaps, with dealing with their consequences} The three institutions that Hare eventually picked were institutions that were, in the 19805, more acted upon than active. True to his intention, Hare Modern Drama, 42 (Fall 1999) 363 DAVID PATTIE did not attempt a distanced, satirical portrait of institutional change, in the manner of Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (1987); rather, he followed the strategy established in earlier plays such as Teeth 'n' Smiles (1975), Plenty (1978), and the television dramas Licking Hitler and Dreams of Leaving (1978, 1980). These were plays, as Hare described them, that dealt with a society undergoing radical, uncontainable transformation; however, this being England, the changes showed themselves most strongly in the almost invisible , buttoned-down hopelessness of the population at large: We are living through a great, groaning, yawling festival of change - but because this is England it is not always seen on the streets. In my view it is seen in the extraordinary intensity of people's personal despair, and it is to that despair that as a historical writer Ichoose to address myself time and time again ...4 In the 1980s, the direction of social change altered. In the previous decade, Hare wrote about a country emerging, hung over and contrite, from a post-war debauch that had served to deflect attention from the disintegration of everything that held the English state in place. The Empire had gone, but the apparatus of Empire remained uselessly in place; the illusion of international preeminence fostered at Yalta gave way to the implied indignities of the Special Relationship; and the comforting, cosy, stifling social consensus of the 1950S cracked open in the 1960s and 1970s. Hare's dramas sought to place this dislocation in context - to show that the country's current state was the result of a national desire to create and sustain the illusion of greatness. In Licking Hitler, the central character, Anna Seaton, gives this argument powerful expression: Over the years I have been watching the steady impoverishment of the people's ideals, their loss of faith, the lying, the daily inveterate lying, the thirty-year-old deep corrosive national habit of lying [...]5. One might almost say that there was, for Hare, no future in England's dreaming; however, the advent of Thatcherism in 1979 signalled not wakefulness , but the entry into another fitful dream. This time, the dream was...