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...

'David Hare's great quality has always been his refusal to accept the division between fact and imagination. His creative invention is fired by public realities and in turn he makes those realities feel deeply personal. That same quality is wonderfully at work in his essays and poems. Whether he is writing about Tony Blair or Joan Didion, whether he is writing out of love or rage, evoking the intimate moments of his own life or the great moral questions of our times, he brings his subjects...

For forty uninterrupted years, Robert Moses was the most powerful man in New York. Though never elected to office, he manipulated those who were through a mix of guile, charm and intimidation.Motivated at first by a determination to improve the lives of New York City's workers, he created parks, bridges and 627 miles of expressway to connect the people to the great outdoors. But in the 1950s, groups of citizens began to organize against his schemes and against the motor car, campai...

From his early days as a playwright, David Hare has moved deliberately between stage, film and television, over the years building up a repertoire of work, most of which seeks to capture the changing feelings of contemporary life. Now, for the first time, some of Hare's best, and most characteristic, screenplays are collected together in a single volume, confirming his status as one of Britain's most passionate and versatile writers of fiction.This volume also contains an illuminat...

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...

It is 1979. Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her young daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend sets in train a series of events which only find their shape eighteen years later. A generational play about the long term struggle between a strong mother and her loving daughter, Amy's View mixes love, death and the theatre in a way which is both heady and original.

'My whole life, it's been assumed, Western civilisation is an old bitch gone in the teeth. And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, they're fighting for something they believe in.' Via DolorosaIn 1997, after many invitations, the 50-year-old British playwright resolved finally to visit the 50-year-old State of Israel. The resulting play, written to be performed by the author himself, offers a meditation on an extraordinary...

On 15 September 2008, capitalism came to a grinding halt. As sub-prime mortgages and toxic securities continued to dominate the headlines well into 2009, this spring the National Theatre asked David Hare to write an urgent and immediate work to be staged this autumn that sought to find out what had happened, and why.Capitalism works when greed and fear are in the correct balance. This time they got out of balance. Too much greed, not enough fear.Meeting with many o...

Berlin/WallIn two contrasted readings for the stage, David Hare visits a place where a famous wall has come down; then another where a wall is going up.BerlinFor his whole adult life, David Hare has been visiting the city which so many young people regard as the most exciting in Europe. But there's something in Berlin's elusive character that makes him feel he's always missing the point. Now, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the reunificatio...

In 1991, before an election they did not expect to win, the Conservative government made a fateful decision to privatize the railways. As a result, the taxpayer subsidizes rail more lavishly then ever before. In The Permanent Way, David Hare, working with actors from the Out of Joint Company, tells the intricate, madcap story of a dream gone sour, by gathering together the first-hand accounts of those most intimately involved - from every level of the system.'A drama that stirs ind...

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.

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...