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Michael Coveney: Hare and Billington illuminate the importance of playwrights

Our critic casts his eye over a wave of new theatre books, including David Hare’s memoir ”The Blue Touch Paper”

David Hare
Writing a life: David Hare in his London studio
(© Simon Annand for the Bruntwood Prize)
There's a revealing moment – one of many – in his new memoir, The Blue Touch Paper (Faber, £20), when David Hare says that he resolves at last to sit down at his desk every weekday morning and write, a necessary tactic for any scribe untouched by the magic of indiscriminate genius.

You realise at this point that his seemingly effortless style, the limpid quality of his smart, antithetical prose, as well as the rhythmic flow of his stage dialogue, are all the result of hard graft. What colours this result is the whiplash candour of his judgements, the splendid arrogance (another way of describing self-belief) and his way of rejoicing, profoundly, in the work of his colleagues down the years.

Born in Scotland, raised in Bexhill-on-Sea, educated at Lancing College (Christopher Hampton and Tim Rice were contemporaries) and Jesus College, Cambridge, Hare is in many ways a classic product of the educational system, a natural head boy. But his account of childhood and adolescence – a bright pupil, he was a teacher's favourite on cultural outings and charts his domestic and sexual encounters with a delightful charm and tact – segues seamlessly into his barbed recollections of university life.

His formative disappointments in his teachers, notably Raymond Williams, and in the maverick critical panjandrum George Steiner (who committed to print the magnificent howler of asserting that Lear, not Gloucester, leapt blindly from the Dover cliffs), jostle with his voracious appetite for the modern European cinema of the day and his own adventures in student theatre, where he emerged, gauche yet decisive, alongside Germaine Greer, future art critic Richard Cork and future playwright Steve Gooch.


The memoir ends with the final collapse of his marriage, in 1979, to the television producer Margaret Matheson, during a weekend stay with Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee (whose daily by-line Hare still cannot contemplate without groaning) and her then husband (now deceased), the political journalist and part-time theatre critic Peter Jenkins.

During the last five years of the marriage – which was happy, and produced three children – Hare was also openly in love with Kate Nelligan, the beautiful Canadian actress who illuminated his first West End success, Knuckle (1974), his first television film Dreams of Leaving (1976) and arguably his first great play Plenty (1978). The way Hare writes about this touchingly fused double love life is extraordinary, and very moving.

The book's more utilitarian value is in documenting the early years of the fringe – Hare's character-forming involvement in Portable Theatre (which he founded with Howard Brenton, Tony Bicât and Snoo Wilson), his ambiguous relationship with the Royal Court, his work with William Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark in Joint Stock, and then Out of Joint, his collaborations and friendships with Richard Eyre and Peter Hall, his admiration for Caryl Churchill and Wallace Shawn, and his encounters and dealings with the great Broadway impresario Joe Papp, with John Osborne, Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter.

And it's scathing pay-back time, too, for the critics (and why not?), with some poisoned darts stuck in the effigies of John Gross and Milton Shulman; even a translation of Kenneth Tynan's intense dislike of Brenton's Weapons of Happiness – which Hare directed, the first new play in the new National in 1976 – into an enamelled badge of honour. I've enjoyed the book so much, in fact, that I've already re-read great swathes of it forwards and backwards. It's sure to become a classic tale of a life in the theatre of our times.

'The rock on which all theatre is predicated is on the work of the writer'

I'll be returning forever, too, to Michael Billington's The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present (Guardian/Faber £18.99): that sub-title means from Aeschylus to Mike Bartlett, with stop-offs at seven of Shakespeare (though not King Lear), two each of Lope de Vega, Goldoni, Schiller, von Kleist, Ibsen, Shaw and Brecht, with single shout-outs for the obviously canonical Webster, Racine (though not Phèdre) Gogol, Büchner, Wedekind, Wilde and Pirandello (not Six Characters) and nods for Miller (not Death of a Salesman), Beckett (not Waiting for Godot) , Pinter, Ayckbourn, Bond (not Saved), Stoppard, Churchill, Friel, Frayn, Hare (phew!), Bennett and Butterworth.

If that sounds like a list, the really great thing about the book is the continuous narrative Billington makes of it in his discussion of direct experience of the plays as a critic over so many years, and all the choices and omissions are incorporated in his compelling argument about them, and in the specific productions that inform those choices and omissions. "Theatre not text" was an aggressive slogan on the fringe for a time; but no devised, conceptual or site-specific performance was ever any good without the "writing" intervention of the director. The rock on which all theatre is predicated is on the work of the writer – or, equally importantly, the significant lack of a writer – so the history of performance is meaningless without reference, at least, to the evolving canon.

As if to prove this point, the admirable critic and scholar Aleks Sierz, author of the horribly titled In-Yer-Face Theatre and (equally off-putting?) Theatre of Martin Crimp, has published – together with his partner, the Italian "cultural geographer" Lia Ghilardi – The Time Traveller's Guide to British Theatre: The First 400 Years (Oberon, £14.99). It's an entertaining, original and imaginative bird's eye view of British theatre – writers, actors, customs, audiences, social commentary – from Shakespeare to Rattigan conducted by a group of amusingly characterised official guides of each period. Ideal for students and fans alike, there's nothing remotely comparable in the contemporary library of theatre history.

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