Modern Dramatists

A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights

Kimball King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136521195
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This comprehensive collection gathers critical essays on the major works of the foremost American and British playwrights of the 20th century, written by leading figures in drama/performance studies.

Playing with Place: Some Filmic Techniques in the Plays of David Hare

John Russell Brown

Only a very few dramatists have made films. Many have written filmscripts and been involved with the cinema's revisionary processes; but they have not been in charge of that complex collaboration which leads to the finished film: from idea and story to development, casting, setting, shooting, editing—the manifold processes which collect and then order a film's fixed images of reality. David Hare is one dramatist who has done all this: only the camera itself has escaped his direct control.

Many English-speaking dramatists have written plays about theatre—The Entertainer, Noises Off, A Chorus of Disapproval, A Life in the Theatre—and still more have created plays in which the leading characters are performers before live audiences—Burn This, The Real Thing, Amadeus, The Tooth of Crime, The Birthday Party, and (to widen the idea of performance) Waiting for Godot. But David Hare, the dramatist, writes as a filmmaker about filmmaking. His play, A Map of the World (1983), begins with an international conference on poverty set in a luxury hotel in Bombay, but then everything that has been seen so far is revealed as having been a representation of reality, not reality itself. The whole opening scene had been created carefully by its characters, so that it could be recorded by camera, and subsequently edited, for the making of a movie. The dramatist is at home with all this business and has used his inside knowledge to awaken questions about the truth of what art can present about life, and about the efficacy of humanitarian goodwill. This is not unlike the way in which Shakespeare used his familiarity with theatre to juxtapose theatrical performance and the lunacies of authority, love, and sexual strife in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This dramatist also understands those enthusiasts who feed greedily upon a film's plausible and engrossing illusion of reality. Whereas Hamlet had believed that a play was the thing to “catch the conscience of the king.” Hare's characters turn to the cinema as a rather desperate escape from the intolerable crises of conscience in their own actual lives. At the end of the first scene of Act II of The Secret Rapture (1988), Irwin and Rhonda are discovered in an intimate moment by Isobel, Irwin's lover. He is almost speechless, “looking at ISOBEL,” while Isobel is “standing thinking, taking no notice of RHONDA”; so the initiative has to be Rhonda's:

RHONDA: Well, anyway, I'm going to the flicks. Excuse me.

ISOBEL: We'll come with you.

RHONDA: I'm sorry?

ISOBEL: I'd like to come.

(IRWIN looks across amazed, RHONDA puzzled.)

RHONDA: It's very violent. I saw the trailer. It's one of those Los Angeles crime
things. Rooms full of blood. Then the cop says, “Right. I want everyone here
to help look for his ear…”

ISOBEL: Sounds fine. I'd like that. No really.

(She turns and looks at IRWIN.)
That would be good. I mean it. Let's all go to the cinema…. Then we can
have a good time. (58)

The dramatist himself has not been carried away by the power of cinema; Hare remains critical of these characters. Besides, he has turned back from filmmaking, which at one time used all his creative energies, and is writing again for the theatre. With Racing Demon (1990), he brought a theatre-person into his play. This is Ewan Gilmour, an out-of-work stage actor, who is the lover of clergyman Harry Henderson. But Ewan is not glamorized in conventionally theatrical ways: he wears simple, unremarkable clothes, and speaks in a Glaswegian accent; he is terse, not voluble, when he is angry, and seems to be without very much guile; he is first seen reading a comic, with a pile more at his side. Ewan is given a chance of earning easy money by selling his story to a cheque-book journalist, but he does not incriminate Harry: this actor is loyal to his friend. In a play about weakening faith and duplicity, in which the other characters seek solutions to nothing more than their own difficulties. Hare has introduced someone from the “unreal” world of theatre who stands true to the intimate and scarcely-spoken feelings which bind two people together. The contrast with the successful and self-concemed film actors of A Map could hardly be greater. So, in assessing Hare's work as a dramatist, it may be profitable to notice both what his work as a film-maker has contributed to his stage plays and how he has returned to the theatre to enjoy its own distinct opportunities.

I

The most fundamental difference between the film and the other arts is that, in its world-picture, the boundaries of space and time are fluid. … In the plastic arts, as also on the stage, space remains static, motionless, unchanging. without a goal and without a direction….

Hauser 227

David Hare has, from his earliest plays, tried to buck this “static'” limitation which others have seen as natural to the stage: he has constantly played with space. In Knuckle (1974). he took Curly successively from one location to another, in a quest for information about his sister who had disappeared; each new setting showed this central character in a new light. In Teeth ‘n’ Smiles (1975), he brought a loud and trendy pop group to a gig within the precincts of a Cambridge college, banishing time-honored proprieties and leaving the place itself barely recognizable. In Pravda (1985), written with Howard Brenton, the newspaper proprietors are not kept on their own turf; they are also shown in a garden, an Exhibition Hall, a London Club, a bungalow in Weybridge. a Greyhound Stadium, the Yorkshire moors, a TV studio.

In the shorter of two one-act plays of 1986. Wrecked Eggs, Hare brought two of its three characters from New York City to a cottage in Rhinebeck in upstate New York, displacing them from the habitat of their professional lives. This drama turns on a further change of context, for during its action the set is filled with preparations for a large party to celebrate the couple's divorce. Only one guest will come, however, and she and the hostess are left alone on the brink of this event; this very theatrical moment of quiet recognition is the heart of the play. A violent outburst then follows which alters what is about to happen, and revalues the entire action. It may seem that only the change which has been effected in the potential of the single set could have caused this detonation: the characters are confronted with a crisis by a visual transformation of the setting.

In many ways these manipulations of stage place operate very simply. Computerized switchboards have now brought a more filmic fluidity of scene to the theatre and endowed a dramatist with a much stricter control over an audience's attention. No longer are dramatis personae confined within the three walls of a constructed stage set, a limited and defined environment which has to be changed behind a curtain or during a meaningless darkness. Not does the play have to be enacted before some permanent background which serves for every scene by making minor changes—opening this door rather than that, thrusting out a bed or a table, carrying on flags or flowers, or changing the way the stage and its structure are lit. A more filmic illusion is now possible because stage lighting has become infinitely and finely variable, so susceptible to electronic control that onstage action has almost unlimited mobility from place to place. Hare uses these devices boldly and they become increasingly important in his plays, as if he were eager to bring theatre much closer to the “fluidity” of film.

Hare knows as much as almost anyone about the power of electronic switchboards; he has directed numerous plays at the National Theatre in London and at the Public Theatre in New York, where he has worked with the foremost lighting designers and the most sophisticated equipment. Already in Plenty of 1978, he called for an arbitrary change of place by using light and color; the scenery must change silently in full view of the audience, without apparent human aid. So Susan Traherne moves from England to France, and back in time, in a seamless continuation of performance. The penultimate scene is in a seedy hotel in Blackpool in 1962:

(LAZAR turns the nightlight off. Darkness.)

SUSAN: Tell me your name.

(Pause.)

LAZAR: Code name.

(Pause.)

Code name.

(Pause.)

Code name Lazar.

(LAZAR opens the door of the room. At once music plays. Where you would expect
a corridor you see the fields of France shining brilliantly in a fierce green square.
The room scatters.)

SCENE TWELVE

St Benoît, August 1944.

The darkened areas of the room disappear and we see a French hillside in high summer. The stage picture forms piece by piece. Green, yellow. brown. Trees. The fields stretch away. A high sun. A brilliant August day. Another FRENCHMAN stands looking down into the valley. He carries a spade, is in Wellingtons and corduroys. He is about 40, fattish with an unnaturally gloomy air.

Then SUSAN appears climbing the hill. She is 19. She is dressed like a young French girl, her pullover over her shoulder. She looks radiantly well.

FRENCHMAN: Bonjour, ma'moiselle.

SUSAN: Bonjour. (205-6)

This closing scene is rather like a walk into the sunset at the end of an old film: Susan smiles at the stranger, and they look at each other, about to go. But then Hare directs a pause, in which he pulls the focus back to Susan by giving her words to speak: “There will be days and days and days like this” (207). The effect is complicated because the audience knows what Susan at this moment does not: her prognostication is quite obviously untrue, having been denied by what has already been shown on this stage. In a film, the characters would now start walking into a real sunset, getting smaller and smaller in the distance; the camera might show them moving closer together or beginning to dance. But on stage, Susan is life-sized and close to the audience to the very end. Even though her whole self may shine with confidence and well-being on this brilliant summer's day, the darkness and waste of the days to come are summoned up in the audience's mind. Hare has used modern technology to control attention,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• CASEBOOKS ON MODERN DRAMATISTS
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor's Note
• Introduction
• List of Articles
• Who Wrote "John Arden's" Plays?
• Ayckboum's Theatricality
• Empire of Light: Luminosity and Space in Beckett's Theater
• The Romans in Britain: Aspirations and Anxieties of a Radical Playwright
• Monsters and Heroines: Caryl Churchill's Women
• More Real than Realism: Horton Foote's Impressionism
• Negotiating History. Negotiating Myth: Friel among His Contemporaries
• Hedda's Children: Simon Gray's Anti-heroes
• Romanticism and Reaction: Hampton's Transformation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses
• Playing with Place: Some Filmic Techniques in the Plays of David Hare
• Master Class and the Paradox of the Diva
• Phallus in Wonderland: Machismo and Business in David Marnet's American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross
• A Place at the Table: Hunger as Metaphor in Lillian Hellman's Days to Come and Marsha Norman's 'night. Mother
• The Personal, the Political, and the Postmodem in Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Déjàvu
• The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, The Lover, and The Homecoming: A Revisionist Approach
• What's Wrong with this Picture? David Rabe's Comic-Strip Plays
• The Artistic Trajectory of Peter Shaffer
• Great Expectations: Language and the Problem of Presence in Sam Shepard's Writing
• Funny Money in New York and London: Neil Simon and Alan Ayckboum
• Broadway Babies: Images of Women in the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim
• From Zurich to Brazil with Tom Stoppard
• David Storey's Aesthetic of "Invisible Events"
• Female Laughter and Comic Possibilities: Uncommon Women and Others
• Vision and Reality: Their Very Own and Golden City and Centre 42
• August Wilson's Folk Traditions
• The Artist in the Garden: Theatre Space and Place in Lanford Wilson