David Hare Research Articles

David Hare'in Stuff Happens ve The Permanent Way Adlı Oyunlarında Neoliberalizmin Eleştirel Bir Analizi

This paper concentrates on two plays written during the core period of the neoliberal era, specifically the 2000s. The works under examination are The Permanent Way and Stuff Happens. Acknowledging that literary productions are intertwined with broader and more complex social structures, this study endeavours to identify the dialectical relationships between Hare’s plays, the societies they reflect, and the dominant neoliberal policies prevalent since the 1970s. The research aims to contextualize David Hare’s selected plays and argue that they possess a dialectical relationship with the societies of their creation. Employing the dialectical method, the analysis examines the interactive arrangements between the plays and their socio-political context, emphasizing Hare’s unique language and thematic choices that construct his literary argument. Given the prevalence of neoliberal ideology, this research centers on plays written after the new millennium. The selection is based on their strong reflections of neoliberal policies and their perceived contribution to the decline of neoliberalism. Hence, this study aims to investigate the representation of economic and social inequalities within Hare’s plays, coinciding with the dissolution of social integrity and corruption of institutions, signifying the decline of neoliberalism

David Hare’s Memoir of Coronavirus and His Political Rage in Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue

In Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue (2020), David Hare gives a personal account of his illness period during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the middle of March 2020 to the first week of April. In this monologue play, Hare deals with the decay of his body under the attack of the coronavirus and then dwells on his recovery process. On the one hand, this play appears to be a personal chronicle of the playwright’s experience with the Covid-19 virus. On the other hand, Hare’s narration of the news about the virus from the United Kingdom and the world serves to reveal national and collective memory of the crisis. As a playwright who frequently works on political realities and topical issues, Hare intermingles his personal memory and the collective record of the pandemic to censure the leaders incapable of coping with ambiguous circumstances. Thus, his memoir unveils not only Hare’s political commentary but also his political rage as his tone is tinged with anger and disappointment when it comes to the Conservative Party’s failure to protect people against the virus in the country. This paper intervenes in Hare’s monologue play, Beat the Devil, to investigate the playwright’s use of autobiographical and collective memory and evaluates Hare’s expression of political rage in his exploration of the coronavirus.

The Urgent Literary Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic in David Hare's "Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue"

The Urgent Literary Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic in David Hare's "Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue"

ПРАГМАТИЧЕСКИЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ СТРУКТУР СО ЗНАЧЕНИЕМ НЕЧЕТКОСТИ ПРИЗНАКА В ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ

Abstract: The article considers cases of using approximate names of objects and their attributes in political discourse as a part of the speaker's communicative strategy, specifies the corpus of approximators which actualize the meaning of "approximate, fuzzy" in the studied type of discourse. The study is based and illustrated by the extracts from transcripts of public speeches of modern politicians, articles published in British and American press and the political play "Stuff Happens" by David Hare.

COVID-19 POLITICIZED: A STUDY IN DAVID HARE'S BEAT THE DEVIL

The theatre is a communal activity: a play is written by a playwright, directed on a stage by an artist, and performed by a number of actors for audience who attend a theatre house. Such incorporation never abides by the strict rules of quarantine and social distancing enforced by national and world authorities. Hence, the closure of theatres and people's shunning such activities. But neither artists nor playwrights have easily given in: they have creatively sought novel techniques of presentation irrespective of different locations of director, actor, and audience. The well-known English playwright David Hare is one of a number of playwrights who have resorted to employ the advanced applications of technology, especially in the field of computer and its utilities, to help in bringing the "theatre" to the audience's places. In this one-act play, Hare exploits his personal experience with Govid-19 to storm his harsh critiques of the political system; hence, the use of the "personal" to criticize the "political." The analogy between his own "sickness" and the "failure" of the political systems to successfully deal with the Govid crisis and its disastrous effects recalls Hare's interest in criticizing the authorities' improper treatment of domestic issues, which poses as a distinctive motif of early plays. This paper is indeed an attempt to explore Hare's dramatic and ironic employment of the Govid disaster

David Hare’s Proposal of an Alternative Religion to Object to the Commercial Religion of Thatcherism

British political drama of the 1980s was heavily under the influence of Margaret Thatcher’s government and its policies which were introduced to the economy and which diffused into every domain of public life. Political dramatists could not respond immediately to the abrupt changes that occured in social and political life at the beginning of the decade. They got prolific only in the second half of the decade and dared to display the influence of Thatcher’s government not only on the state institutions but also on the private lives of the people. One of the foregoing political dramatists, David Hare, in the 1980s, looked back on his dramaturgy and revised it in tune with the requirements of this new decade. As a result, in The Secret Rapture, staged in 1988, Hare dwells upon the state politics as insinuated into people’s private lives rather than directly criticise it. Moreover, Hare contrasts, in the play, the dominant values of the present decade, in social and private terms, with those embraced in the previous decade. Then, he creates a new moral-religious alternative by the help of the protagonist Isobel in clash with the economical-religious attitude endorsed by Thatcher’s Britain.

Parti liderinin mücadelesi: David Hare’ın Savaşın Yokluğunda adlı oyununda değişim olasılığı

David Hare’s The Absence of War (1993) deals with the period before an early general election in Britain and the defeat of the Labour Party, which is led by George Jones, to the Conservative Party. Hare presents George Jones as a weak leader who cannot actively take part in the policy making process because he is constantly controlled by the members of his advisory committee who prevent George from making his own statements before the public and while speaking to the media by using the established traditions in the party system. Through George, Hare makes references to Neil Kinnock who was the leader of the Labour Party between 1983-1992 and aimed to change the social and economic policies of the Party, but he resigned after the defeat in the 1992 general election. The major aim of this paper is to argue that Hare illustrates, and in a way comments on, Kinnock’s leadership through that of George’s in the play, so he presents a historical period in British politics through a fictional character. In this sense, Hare demonstrates that both leaders of the Labour Party aim to reform the party; however, both encounter resistance; while George is silenced by his advisory committee, Kinnock is accused of changing the ideological and economic basis of the party. Moreover, it will be displayed that although both leaders resign before winning a general election, they struggle to introduce revolutionary changes to the traditional system in the Party in order to appeal to voters.

CONTROVERSIAL EFFECT OF BERTOLT BRECHT’S EPIC THEATRE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH POLITICAL DRAMA AND ITS ILLUSTRATION IN DAVID HARE’S FANSHEN

British political drama took its place on contemporary British stage without the boundaries of a certain manifesto but with the political consciousness of a group of leftist playwrights in the late 1960s. It reflected the disillusionment of these playwrights with the Labour Party politics at home and with some worldwide events like the Vietnam War, student riots in Paris, Soviet Russia’s interventions in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia. British political dramatists wrote explicitly politically and produced their plays, in the first place, by the help of fringe theatre companies, which were touring and which took theatre to the public. Bertolt Brecht was one of the most important literary influences on the development of British political drama, which was mostly denied by political dramatists. Brecht’s impact dated back not only to his theatre company Berliner Ensemble’s visit to London in 1958 but even before the World War II. British playwrights and directors in 1950s and 1960s got acquainted with Brecht’s works both in Britain and in Germany and they helped to introduce Brecht’s epic theatre on British stage. This generation of playwrights and directors paved the way for the development of political drama in Britain. Even though political dramatists did conceal, Brecht’s epic theatre was, in literary terms, one of the greatest influences on political drama. This study will briefly talk about the development of British political drama and then it will reveal to what extent Brecht’s epic theatre affected British political playwrights. Lastly, it will explore Brechtian influences in a play Fanshen (1975) by one of the representative political playwrights, David Hare.

Tom Stoppard: A Life

Tom Stoppard: A Life

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

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.

Hakikat mücadelesi: Bir Covid-19 hastasının monoloğu

David Hare tells a Covid-19 patient's experience in his play Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue staged in 2020. Starting from his own Covid-19 experience, Hare sheds light on an old individual’s Covid-19 process. Since he does not know how the virus influences him, he loses confidence in the health sector and the government's Covid-19 politics. The text shows the older man's lonely struggle for finding the truth in a post-truth era when the truth can be quickly warped through politics and media in an interrelated way. Covid-19 was the last hit of the global problems such as malnutrition, poverty, refugee crisis, AIDS epidemic, access to clean water in a so-called well-developed world in the last century. Despite the scientific advancements, scientists have confronted difficulties understanding the scope of the global problem that humanity faces today. For so long, there have been ongoing discussions on the concept of post-truth and its central role in state politics in terms of economy and policies on the human subject. The critical issue is whether Covid-19 is linked to the politics of ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ on a political level or a health problem on a scientific level. Hare’s play portrays the untold misery and suffering of millions of people who had to stay home without knowing the scope of the threat outside. This study aims at interpreting the conditions mentioned above in a theoretical way.

The Personal and the Political: An Analysis of Selected Extracts from David Hare's "Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue"

The Personal and the Political: An Analysis of Selected Extracts from David Hare's "Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue"

A Map of the World에 나타난 여성의 재현

David Hare’s A Map of the World (1982) includes diverse themes such as the confrontation between the right-wing and left-wing over the aids for the third world, the relationship between reality and art, and the representations and transformation of reality in various art forms. One sign which connects these themes is a woman, which is represented and re-represented amidst the ideology battle between the right-wing and left-wing alpha males in the various forms of art—a novel, a play and a film. Most of this play enacts the film version of Mehta’s novel. The remaining parts show the actors’ interactions in the film studio. The play’s representations of women including both the film scenes and the studio scenes are not pro-woman despite the outbursts of feminist art and scholarship at the time when Hare wrote this play. The representation of Peggy, the early twenties jazz violinist, who is the main female character of the play, is stereotypical in that she is anti-intellect and pro-sensual. Peggy is the parody of a sexually liberated American woman of the 70s. Even though the real-life Peggy complains that the film sensationalises the one-night stand and claims that she outgrows the immature former self, she does not show much more emotional and intellectual maturity than the film version of Peggy. Even though real women can be distorted and misrepresented due to male writers and directors’ slanted perspectives, in A Map of the World, there is no evidence that positive female role models do exist in the world outside the novel and film. Even though Hare, a sharp critic of the dated British conventions and values, explores alternative values and dreams of the utopia through his plays, at least in this play, women have no place in his visions.

Theatrical Responses to the American War in Iraq: A Study in Things Happen by David Hare

وصفت الدراما الحربية المعاصرة بأنها رد فعل على المعاناة العميقة التي نشأت عن الحرب التي، لسوء الحظ، أصبحت أللغة العليا للاتصال في العصر الحديث. وبالتالي، فإن المسرح السياسي الانكليزي المعاصر قد أظهر ترابطا فريدا بين الدراما والسياسة: فالاهتمام بالحرب بين الولايات المتحدة والعراق ليس استثناء في الواقع. الكاتب المسرحي البريطاني، ديفيد هير، ينتمي إلى اتجاه الدراما الحربية التي تمكن العالم من رؤية الحقيقة والصدمة والعنف في الحرب الأمريكية في العراق. الأشياء تحدث تساعد وبمهارة لتبين كيف أن الولايات المتحدة وظفت الدبلوماسية القسرية لتلاعب الدول الأخرى لتحقيق المذهب الجديد : "القرن الأمريكي الجديد". في الأشياء تحدث، هير يتوثق تاريخ العراق المأساوي الأخير في مثل هذا النهج الذي يمزج الفيلم الوثائقي مع الخيالية لعرض الأحداث من عام 2000، حتى الغزو الفعلي للعراق في آذار 2003. المسرحية تتبع أصول الحرب الأمريكية في العراق وتكشف النقاب عن كل المحاولات والإجراءات التي اتخذها بوش وفريق أدارته لغزو العراق. وتركز هذه الدراسة بشكل رئيسي على عنصر القوة الذي يميز دوافع القادة الأمريكيين والسعي المتواصل للسلطة. أن الاشياء تحدث لهير، ومع ذلك، تضع سياقه لإستراتيجية بوش القسرية فيما يتعلق بالعراق، فضلا عن التلاعب به من الأمم المتحدة، بلير، باول، وشخصيات أخرى للمساعدة في تحقيق أهدافه.

A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock

A Psychoanalysis of Milk: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock

The global financial crisis and its aftermath: a perspective from fiction

PurposeSince the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 academic research has paid considerable attention to understanding the nature of the crisis, its causes and consequences. This is not surprising given the scale and scope of the crisis. Much of this research has been undertaken within social science disciplines. At the same time, the crisis has also been the subject of fiction – novels, poetry and drama, and there is also a small body of academic scholarship on fiction relating to the crisis (and on finance in fiction more generally). The purpose of this paper is to suggest that fiction can offer a new perspective on the global financial crisis and thereby enhance our understanding of it.Design/methodology/approachThis exploration draws upon three works of post-crisis fiction: the 2009 play by David Hare, The Power of Yes: A Dramatist Seeks to Understand the Financial Crisis (hereafter The Power of Yes); Other People’s Money, a novel by Justin Cartwright (2011); and Robert Harris’s novel The Fear Index also published in 2011. Its approach is based on close readings of the three texts in question.FindingsFinance fiction stimulates a reconceptualization of the global financial crisis as a crisis of innovation and technological change.Originality/valueThis paper is a viewpoint article. The originality lies in the author’s interpretation of reading the global financial crisis through fiction.

Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today

Play for Today was a series of single dramas broadcast by the BBC between 1970 and 1984. These were years of crisis, a time when the consensus politics of Britain’s postwar world had begun to unravel. Industrial relations, education and the health service faced fundamental challenges, the country was struggling with the end of empire, and the personal had become increasingly political. Play for Today reflected and responded to all of this and more in 300 dramas, shown in primetime on BBC One to audiences numbered in millions. Many of the best actors, writers and directors of the time contributed to the series, with some of the best-remembered broadcasts being Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills and the strange fantasy, Penda’s Fen, written by Alan Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke. The series was contemporary, often controversial and occasionally censored. But it was also immensely varied, showcasing social realism with comedy, costume drama with fantasy, and personal visions with state-of-the-nation overviews. It was mischievous, critical and challenging, and unafraid to tackle taboos. Marking the 50th anniversary of the first Play for Today in October 1970, this film is a celebration of the series, told by a number of its producers, directors and writers. It explores the origins of the series, its achievements and its controversies. Presenting a rich range of often surprising extracts from the archive, the film features interviews with, among others, producers Kenith Trodd, Margaret Matheson and Richard Eyre, film-makers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and writer and director David Hare.

Brechtian AlienAsian: Socialist ex Machina from Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and David Hare's Fanshen

Brechtian AlienAsian:Socialist ex Machina from Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan and David Hare's Fanshen Sheng-mei Ma (bio) Anchored in working-class culture and socialist belief, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht theorizes Alienation-effect to advocate performers' and spectators' emotional dissociation from the stage in favor of thinking through, to borrow the title of Timothy J. Wiles's 1980 book, "the theater event."1 The A-effect intends to overhaul the modern stage for a non-Aristotelian, non-Stanislavsky alternative, partly inspired by a Peking Opera female impersonator Mei Lanfang, whose performances, for lack of a better word, "wowed" him in Moscow in 1935. Considering the political implications of the visit, John Fuegi asserts that Brecht was invited to Moscow with the express order "to be extremely explicit in opposing the Nazis in his own writings."2 But party affiliation aside, the theory of A-effect served to legitimize the dramatist's own sense of dis-orientation by "Oriental" theatrical stylization. That which is taken for granted within traditional Chinese dramaturgy so shocks Brecht that he finds the model for his vision of epic theater.3 The white love for the inexplicable, mystical Orient means to love it to death, to read into the riddle of a "Chinese box" the West's own wish fulfillment. The West's enlightenment comes at the expense of occluding the East. Not to mince words, Brecht births epic theater over the dead body of Chinese theater, a collage of fragmentary impressions rather than an evolving, organic heritage. And Brecht's self-centered, left-leaning Orientalism is inherited by the socialist David Hare in his early agitprop and populist plays. Critiquing Brecht's theory and practice of Alienation-effect, this exploration focuses on his seminal [End Page 443] essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" (1936), his play The Good Woman of Setzuan (1947, henceforth Setzuan), and Hare's copycat or "copychinese" Fanshen (1976). Alienation, by definition, involves a split, and for Brecht, alienation in drama entailed a departure from Aristotelian-Stanislavskian conventions. Such division is constitutive of Marxism, which posits dialectical forces vying for dominance throughout human history. Contestation of opposites within oneself and one's world recurs in Brecht's dramas. But even the word "alienation" casts its own shadow. Effecting Brecht's Alienation required an alien nation—a phantom one at that—to prop up the white state of being. The operative word may well be spelled with its uncanny sound-alikes: AlieNation, even AlienAsian. These two neologisms—an "alien nation" comprised of "alien Asians"—dwell holographically within "alienation." The long shadow cast all the way to the other side of the earth bespeaks Brecht and Hare's quixotic quest beyond the capitalist West, chancing upon a solution in socialist ex machina. The Oriental Other provides an "out" from their Western selfhood, an escape clause from the contractual bond(age) to the West by virtue of birth and cultural upbringing. The socialist China peoples their stage, as though crowding off the Western tradition. This replacement hearkens back, ironically, to Greek tragedies' deus ex machina, yet another Western legacy against which the playwrights presumably rebel. In Aeschylus' or Euripides' tragedies, deus ex machina or God from the machine, i.e., lowered with ropes or on a crane, or emerged on a riser through a trapdoor, rounds off the play with a divine, even cathartic, closure. In Brecht and Hare, the socialist China does not descend only when the curtain drops—it constitutes the whole play. Yet these early plays featuring socialist ex machina and Brechtian AlienAsian are but a mere "yellow" touch ("stain," some critics argue) on their largely white corpus. Whether a people's awakening to self-sufficiency in Brecht's Setzuan or Hare's communist apologia in the West's counterculture movement, this socialist ex machina is fully enacted in these early plays to intimate an Oriental utopia in the making vis-a-vis the capitalist West. Nevertheless, such dabbling in the East occupies but a miniscule portion of their corpuses, exposing the whim of young idealistic artists coming of age, a momentary flirt with the unknown beyond the West, before they [End Page 444] settle in for...

Fanshen에 나타난 공산주의 정치 리더십 비판

David Hare’s play, Fashen (1976) dramatizes the land reform in Long Bow village in China from 1945-48, which was recorded in William Hinton’s documentary of the same title. Hare, in his preface to the play and various interviews, says that he focuses on “political leadership” in his play because this subject is an urgent one, especially in Europe’s political climate. According to his preface, he attempts to convey to the European audience who have not experienced “what exactly that change might involve and how it can in practice be effected.” But this does not mean that Hare completely glorifies Chinese “fanshen” in his play. Even though he evaluates the land reform in Long Bow as a positive change, Fanshen through its character interactions and scene structures, reveals doubts and criticisms toward the communist leadership during the reform process in China. The discrepancy between the communist ideals about the proletariat leadership and the reality in Long Bow is obvious throughout the play. Even though the communist precursors such as Marx, Engles, and Mao Tse Tung claim that the classless society led by the proletariat is attainable in the communist country, a new hierarchy in the Long bow village defies their idealistic claims. All the decisions about the land reform and the people’s classification are easily overturned by the higher-ranking leaders. The highest point in the power pyramid is Mao Tse Tung whose instructions are the ultimatum in all the decision making. The personal suffering of the common people who belong to the lowest in the chains of power is ignored, and the episodes not related to “fanshen” are abruptly dropped. The basic human rights and freedom of the ordinary peasants are neither cultivated nor celebrated in this village. The play certainly asks the desirable conditions of the political leadership rather than endorsing the “fanshen” process in China.

David Hare'in "Stuff Happens"ı: Alternatif Bir Irak Savaşı Anlatısı

In the 20th century postmodernism has fundamentally altered the approach to the concept of history. Showing that grand narratives can be reversed by minor narratives, Jean-François Lyotard played a great role in the development of postmodernism. The purpose of this article is to analyse how the dramatic techniques used in David Hare’s play Stuff Happens in line with Lyotard’s take deconstruct grand narratives about Iraq War at the beginning of the 21st century. By manipulating verbatim theatre techniques, the play asserts that historical reality must always be perceived through a sceptical perspective. Setting the political verbatim accounts, therefore the grand narratives, with unheard minor voices/narratives, Hare, both unearths the discrepancies of political reality and stresses that every narrative is fictional. In this respect, as a postmodern text, Stuff Happens rejects construction of grand narratives by drawing attention to alternative realities and demonstrates that political grand narratives cannot be unique realities.