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from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

'Great plays are born in the heat of passion'

Telegraph

(Filed: 01/03/2003)

In a few days, David Hare is up for an Oscar. But for now his mind is on the Birmingham Rep, as it prepares to revive his most famous work. Here he explains why the searing early-1990s trilogy is as resonant now as the day he wrote it.

Evelyn Waugh says somewhere that a novelist is exceptional if he turns out to have more than one theme. If he - or she - is prodigiously talented, then perhaps, in the whole of a long working life, he may find his way towards two.

However, just occasionally, at the moment when he least expects it, a writer of fiction may also have the luck to stumble on a pure gift of subject matter. It will certainly be something he doesn't deserve, a sort of bonus which is somehow just sitting there, as if waiting for his attention.

In Waugh's case, a visit to Forest Lawn cemetery on a trip to California revealed an unforeseen desire to make fun of the morbid death rites of modern Americans in The Loved One. In my own, a spontaneous decision, on the morning of July 13 1987, to get in my car and go up the motorway towards York led to my virgin attendance at the General Synod of the Church of England.

Everyone knows that dramatists find plays in the most unlikely places, but even so, you would hardly bet on any playwright being inspired by an assembly which is principally known for taking what you might call the parliamentary approach to spiritual matters.

There was something so ridiculous, so touching about full-frock clergymen rising to their feet "on a point of order, Madam Chairperson", or even "through the chair, if I may" that I found myself fascinated by the question of who on earth these people were, and why they were behaving in this extraordinary manner. Why did they imagine it regular theological practice to attempt an earnest, genteel mimicking of Westminster when trying to address the most profound questions known to man?

It took me, as it happened, almost two years and the close acquaintance of many dedicated clergymen in south London to realise that my first satirical impressions of the Church of England were both shallow and unworthy. As soon as I plunged myself into the pastoral life of working priests in Clapham, Battersea and Kennington, I discovered a hard-working group of men who were doing what was effectively social work, often among the most tragic and deprived people in the parish, and all for a salary of around £8,000 a year.

They were ostentatiously reluctant to force their own beliefs on a doubting public. Instead, they sought, from the liberal wing of the Church, to express their love of God through their own actions and behaviour. They believed in example, not in instruction.

At a time when trendy Thatcherite propaganda was insisting that the only valuable people in society were those who went out on their own initiative to create wealth, it was bracing and salutary to meet people whose values were so wholly against the spirit of the day.

As I followed these ever-hopeful vicars round their duties, it occurred to me that they were, in a sense, my new heroes. The Church in action demonstrated the belief that there was no nobler calling than to devote your life to bandaging wounds created by a transient administration whose successful intention had been to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

As a young man, I had assumed that anyone who entered a traditional profession such as the church or the law was likely either to be naive or self-interested. They were perpetuating structures which often did not deserve to survive. But as I spent time over the subsequent five-year period, observing policemen, priests, doctors and teachers who were all trying, however inadequately, to mitigate the practical effects of the worst policies of the time, my view of the caring professions underwent a complete change.

What if these people were neither the institutional buffoons I had thought them in my caustic, ideological youth, nor indeed the hopeless losers of Margaret Thatcher's loathsome demonology, but simply people, more or less like me and you, trying their very best in often impossible circumstances?

It was this realisation - that here was a new group of people who were at once undervalued, unsung and confused - which fired me up to write the three plays which were finally presented together at the National Theatre in 1993. Racing Demon was about team ministry. Murmuring Judges was about the three parts of the criminal justice system - the bar, the police and the prisons. And The Absence of War was about a contemporary Labour Party leader coming to the painful realisation that he was unelectable.

It was Richard Eyre's inspiration, as the artistic director of the company, to put the plays on together in one season, with the idea - to me, again, almost heartstopping in its nobility - that the most important function of a national theatre was to provide the audience with a place where they might argue with themselves and see their own daily lives not just reflected but actually represented. The moment when all three were first played together in a single day was, without any question, the most professionally exciting of my life.

Since then, it has been a private sadness that no British theatre has seen its way to remounting all three plays at once. I could, of course, pretend that this was down to underfunding or a shameful lack of ambition. But this would be dishonest. Plays these days are like operas. It's much easier to get them on for a single production than it is to penetrate them into the repertory.

In this way, I have been no unluckier than anyone else. Racing Demon has been done all over the country, not least by church drama groups and often on stages in the shadows of great cathedrals. But otherwise, the practical challenge of putting on the other two, both with large casts and on forbidding subjects, has put off every likely producer.

You may imagine, therefore, the debt of gratitude I already feel to the suicidally courageous new director of the Birmingham Rep, Jonathan Church, who in 18 months has transformed his unloved concrete bunker (architecturally, a provincial Mini-Me to Denys Lasdun's South Bank Dr Evil) into the most popular and best-spoken-of theatre in the Midlands. Everyone knows he and his co-director Rachel Kavanaugh are taking a risk. A good deal has changed in the past 10 years.

There is a new Archbishop of Canterbury who seems, at least by the authority of his early pronouncements, to be that rarest of phenomena - the genuine spiritual leader. But also, in Britain at large, in law enforcement as much as in politics, there has been a definable shift of mood. Many of us have gone from clear-cut anger to something nearer sullen bewilderment.

The conventional wisdom tells us that nothing dates faster than the up-to-date. My own view is the opposite. Front-line reports acquire a special fascination when they begin to gleam in the different light which is thrown both by distance and a change of perspective.

With the passage of time, plays born in the heat of political passion can turn out much more interesting than those written with an eye to what are embarrassingly called "the eternal truths". These have a habit of going off, like fruit.

In the days when the trilogy was conceived, carers and copers all over the country felt that their role was being deliberately downgraded by a Conservative government which was nakedly unsympathetic to the common good. Now, under a Labour government which seemed at the outset so much more well-meaning and intelligent, they find themselves apparently not greatly advanced, contemplating the structural failings of the health services, of education and of the courts with incomprehension.

However hard we try, nothing seems to go right. It is perhaps not surprising that the only time that I have been in a room with Tony Blair, the only thing he wanted to talk about was his own uneasy memories of a performance of The Absence of War.

I have, as it happens, started work on a new play, intended for Nick Hytner's first season at the National Theatre, in which I try to capture the flavour of this near-despair about our any longer being able to do the most simple things effectively. In the meantime, however, the Reverend Lionel Espy, the liberal vicar, DC Barry Hopper, the corner-cutting detective, and George Jones, the hopeless Old Labour romantic, will make what are, for me, their welcome reappearances.

Plainly the world they lived in has changed, but the longings and frustrations they articulate have not. There is still at large an apparently unassuagable sense of loss, a feeling that we all live in a Britain which is somehow less than we would wish it to be. This mixes, in a complicated way, with our sense of individual powerlessness about being able to affect very much.

I see these three men coming towards me as old friends, dressed in history, but still unquestionably themselves. I can't wait to greet them.

David Hare's 'Racing Demon' opens on March 11, 'The Absence of War' on March 18 and 'Murmuring Judges' on April 7 at the Birmingham Rep (0121 236 4455).

(posted 7698 days ago)

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