David Hare's The Absence of War: Still Writing "Left-Handedly" in an Age Deprived of Ideology

Abstract

British political drama in the 1990s was observed to be concerned more with the global issues than with the state of the nation. The repercussions of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet states, the rise of the United States as the ultimate world power as well as the prevalence of the rightist politics at home were widely handled in the political plays of this period. In this decade, the boundaries between the Right and the Left appeared to be indistinct; therefore, British political drama, which was originally leftist, was assumed to be superannuated. Yet, the established political dramatists together with the new generation of playwrights continued writing politically, though in a different manner, and contributed a lot to the development of political drama. David Hare, one of the leading political playwrights, wrote The Absence of War in 1993 and questioned the very institution of leftist ideology in Britain, Labour Party. However, what Hare critically approached in the play was not leftism itself but the Labour’s politics tainted by rightist values. Hence, though criticising the Labour and though writing in an age when ideologies were becoming steadily less effective, Hare preserved his leftist stance. Within this context, this study aims to display how Hare in The Absence of War queries and asks for the reformation of the conservative traces in Labour Party.