Stuff happens... And it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.'The famous response of Donald Rumsfeld, American Secretary of Defense, to the looting of Baghdad, at a press conference on 11 April 2003, provides the title for a new play, specially written for the Olivier Theatre, about the extraordinary process leading up to the invasion of Iraq.How does the world settle its differences, now ther...

This is a new collection of some of David Hare's finest work, including Skylight (Winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, 1996), Amy's View, The Judas Kiss and My Zinc Bed.

This first volume of David Hare's plays contains his work from the 1970s, including his landmark play of that decade, Plenty, charting the development of 'one of the great post-war British playwrights' ( Independent on Sunday).The volume also includes the plays Slag, Teeth 'n' Smiles, Knuckle and Licking Hitler, and is introduced by the author.

The American historian chronicles her lengthy legal battle with a British Holocaust denier—now a major motion picture starring Rachel Weisz."Deborah Lipstadt's absorbing narrative of an event that has reverberated throughout the world will be read with interest and gratitude by future generations." —Elie WieselIn her acclaimed 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called putative World War II historian David Irving "one...

Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as 'completely unprintable'. The company that first presented them was prosecuted for obscenity in 1921. It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has re-set these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day. Using as much imaginative freedom in his turn as Ophuls did fifty years ago, and with just two a...

This version of Brecht's great anti-war play by playwright David Hare was premiered by the National Theatre, London, in November 1995. It adopts a freer approach to the text than many editions, adapting the original rather than offering a close translation. In this chronicle of the Thirty Years War, Mother Courage followsthe armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquorfrom her canteen wagon. One by one she loses her children to the warbut will not...

People arguing, that isn't theatre. People making points. And what's more, you and I don't belong in drawing rooms. Drawing rooms can't contain us. We need courts and palaces and cathedrals. There's scale for us there. We can move our elbows. Little rooms give us no space.Henry Irving believes that theatre is the only thing that matters. Ellen Terry believes it's more important to be a decent human being. Ellen's daughter Edith Craig believes theatre can change society, bu...

Covid-19 seems to be a sort of dirty bomb, thrown into the body to cause havoc.On the same day that the UK government finally made the first of two decisive interventions that led to a conspicuously late lockdown, David Hare contracted Covid-19. Nobody seemed to know much about it then, and many doctors are not altogether sure they know much more today. Suffering a pageant of apparently random symptoms, Hare recalls the delirium of his illness, which mixed with fear, dream...

An elderly antiquarian bookseller has just died at his home in the country. His two daughters come to attend to things. Isobel, who has been nursing him, is a partner in a small design firm. Marion is in politics - already a junior minister. It is Marion's profession to provide answers, and to back those who offer solutions, but not all human situations yield to a professional approach - least of all when they involve their junior step-mother Katherine.In this elegantly constructed...

Finished just two months before the author's murder on 18 August 1936 by a gang of Franco's supporters, The House of Bernarda Alba is now accepted as Lorca's great masterpiece of love and loathing.Five daughters live together in a single household with a tyrannical mother. When the father of all but the eldest girl dies, a cynical marriage is advanced which will have tragic consequences for the whole family. Lorca's fascinatingly modern play, rendered here in an English ve...

Skylight premiered at the National Theatre in 1995 and then went on to become one of the most internationally successful plays of recent years.This is the definitive edition of Skylight.

When Ellie Dunn joins a house-party at the home of the eccentric Captain Shotover, she causes a stir with her decision to marry for money rather than love, and the Captain's forthright daughter Hesione protests vigorously against the pragmatic young woman's choice. Opinion on the matter quickly divides and a lively argument about money and morality, idealism and realism ensues as Hesione's rakish husband, snobbish sister and Ellie's fiancé - a wealthy industrialist - enter the debate. Writ...