Nostalgic Rapture: Interpreting Moral Commitments in David Hare's Drama

Nostalgic Rapture: Interpreting Moral Commitments in David Hare's Drama JOHN J. SU A deep, if problematic, nostalgia for the Great Britain of World War II suffuses the work of British playwright David Hare. Susan Traherne's exuberant cry at the end of Plenty, "There will be days and days and days like this," exemplifies Hare's troubled nostalgia: the promise of social equality and national renewal with the war's end presented as the final memory of a fragmenting psyche.' Hare identifies himself both personally and artistically in terms of World War II: "I was born in 1947, and it makes me sad to think that mine may be the last generation to care about this extraordinary time in English history.... I must also, if I am honest, admit that the urge to write about it came ... from a romantic feeling for the period.'" Such a sentimental stance is interesting considering the importance Hare's work places on political engagement in the present. Hare's plays directly or indirectly examine how the post-war promise of "Plenty" did not materialize as the unity against Hitler during the war failed to translate into unity in reconstruction during peace.3 Characters in Hare's drama seek something to which they can commit themselves even as they desperately stave off fears that their institutions are no longer worth the commitment. Neither the contemporary political Right nor Left offers the sense of mission shared across class lines during the war. Within this context the nostalgic past offers a mode of interpreting the present, a source for the moral framework Hare's characters find so lacking in British society. This nostalgic framework demands faithfulness or constancy to a vision of the past against a contemporary world given to expediency. Individual moral action is determined through emulating role models of the longedfor past. The crucial question. however, is to what extent can a nostalgic vision of a Britain that perhaps never was provide a moral structuring principle allowing the possibility of right action in the present; more pointedly, can a moral response prove an adequate solution to what Hare has cast as political problems? Modern Dromo, 40 (1997) 23 24 JOHN J. SU Since The Secret Rapture (1988), and through his trilogy of "institution" plays (Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War), Hare has moved more explicitly in the direction of moral drama. Gone are the wild days of the Ponable Theatre, touring the country presenting plays concerned with the socialist message more than the drama itself: I thought the political and social crisis in England in 1969 so grave that I had no patience for the question of how well written a play was. I was only concerned with how urgent its subject matter was, how it related to the world outside.4 The Hare who has become an institution at the National Theatre now writes about goodness: I'm bored by propaganda, either from the left or right. But goodness makes me weep. I see Isabel [of The Secret Rapture] that way. So I said, Why don't I write about goodness ? Why be a smartass?5 The transition has not been effonless, Hare having at moments to forestall criticism that his nostalgia might equate with political disengagement, precisely the criticism leveled at the moral drama of his contemporary, Tom Stoppard.The problem of moral drama in general, and Hare's and Stoppard's specifically , is not that it chooses an apolitical stance. On the contrary, Stoppard has insisted that the political can never divorce itself from the moral sphere: "I believe all political acts must bejudged in moral terms.'" T.S. Eliot, perhaps the most rigorously systematic English moral dramatist of the twentieth century , throughout the 1930S opposed the theological-moral framework of Christianity to communism, finding the struggle between the two "religions" to define the cru~ of the modern dilemma: "There can only be the two [religions ]. Christianity and communism: and there, if you like, is your dilemma.',8 The difficulty moral drama faces is presenting within the confines of the stage a convincing basis for the moral vision. Eliot abandoned overt Christian thematies in his four later plays, seeking...