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Book Reviews 427 . Granville Barker, and Max Beerbohm is even more "oblique" than Kaplan intimated in his Introduction. However, the contributions to this volume, relying to a greater or lesser extent upon current critical, theoretical, and historical exigencies , have produced a timely re-examination of an important and fascinating period in theatre history. RICHARD FOULKES, UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER FlNLAY DONESKY. David Har~: Moral andHistorical Perspectives. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies Number 75. Westport, Cf: Greenwood Press 1996. Pp. XII + 214. $55.00 Finlay Donesky's study of David Hare's plays and films provides a fulsome illustration of Hare's contention that any attempt to manifest a positive moral value in life or in art will be misunderstood and misconstnied. Donesky conflates personal morality and public politics but disassociates the "being" and the "doing " in Hare's plays, which he interprets as expressions of a communal ethic entrenched in an "undemocratic,hierarchical, nonparticipatory" (144) class structure . Moreover. he believes that Hare is "an intuitive writer whose sense of history has more to do with deeply rooted and characteristic ways of feeling than with government policies, formal ideology, or the careers of public leaders " (2). His "Xray" of England's soul "happily works within the expectations" (13) of the mainstream audience at the Royal National Theatre because its exposing of private and public morality is free of didacticism and clothed in elegant wit - in contrast to the more strident and acerbic plays of Brenton, Bond, and Churchill. For Donesky, however, there is some doubt as to the "content" of Hare's private and public morality: consequently, in the Introduction, he announces his project will be "to render ideologically eloquent what appears to be an inarticulate moral void at the heart of Hare's work:' (5). Nevertheless, he proceeds to place this work on a "trajectory" according to the ways in which it interprets or realizes an intuitive moral vision, or "soul," the origin of which Donesky finds in the humanism of F.R. Leavis and D.H. Lawrence. According to Donesky, in Hare's philosophy this personal experience of "goodness" derives from a consensual notion of community values deeply rooted in British society, and particularly evident during and just after the Second World War, but which has been steadily eroding since 1979, the beginning of the Tory ascendancy, when it came into conflict with a "realistic, individualistic " philosophy as manifested in a free-market economy. For Hare, this is regrettable ; for Donesky it is not. According to the critic, the playwright demonizes the forces of individualism and enterprise as selfish and acquisitive, the hellish offspring of Thatcherism; and Hare's concept of "goodness" is a "monolithic" and elitist concept entrenched in an authoritative, paternalistic BOOK REVIEWS society, and manifested in its institutions - the government, the church, the courts. Donesky substantiates his view of the relationship between the private and public morality in Hare's plays through a detailed overview of British social and political history of"tenuinal decay," which he Claims cannot be understood without such contextualizing. In Hare's early plays, such as How Brophy Made Good, Slag, and The Great Exhibition, Donesky detects a parody of humanistic values, but in the plays after Knuckle (1974), "positive moral value operates in a total manner as a pure uncontested universal/national authority" (24). In Plenty, which he acclaims as Hare's definitive "state-of-the-nation play," a "tragedy about a society in decline " (86), contemporary Britain is portrayed as a spiritual wasteland in contrast to the "pure uncontested national standard of morality" during the war . (25). In both Knuckle and Plenty, "[tlhe high moral ground ... is occupied by . alienated, anguished young women possessed with burning rage at the loss of public ideals, yet their own authority is neither created nor sustained by lived experience" (31). The "privatization of morality" begins with the television play, Dreams ofLeaving, a precursor to the film Strapless, in which there is a direct correlation "between the capacity for love and the possession of moral authority" (95). Certainly "love" is an operative positive value in Strapless, but it is not necessarily prescriptive. According to Donesky's schema, Wetherby is the "first evocation of Thatcher's...

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