Word: hares
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Britain may be small - and its press sometimes small-minded - but Hare has helped stretch its artistic influence across the Atlantic. His plays set theater fans buzzing in both London and New York City; most recently The Vertical Hour, a look at the Anglo-American political and cultural divide, and before it, Stuff Happens, about the run-up to the Iraq war in the White House. In 2007, Hare directed Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway in a well-received adaptation of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. And his screenplays are like catnip to the Hollywood A-list...
...Hare could be up for another Oscar nod this year for his latest screenplay, an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. The film, with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, follows a German teenager's love affair with an older woman he later discovers was a Nazi concentration-camp guard. For Hare, it's both a meditation on truth and reconciliation, and an exploration of how ordinary Germans became complicit in Nazi horrors. The Reader revisits his signature subject: how personal responsibility meshes with historical events. And it underlines his role as modern theater's great connector, examining...
...Keeping it Real After around 35 years as British theater's keenest observer of power, you'd think Hare, 61, would be used to the critical parlor games his work inspires. There's a long-standing ritual among theatergoers of playing connect-the-dots between public figures and Hare's versions of them. Some would say that's exactly the kind of reaction the playwright should expect - even aim for. "If you want to write about subjects that are based on historical events, and you want people to be challenged, to look at these events in a different light...
...rarely a coincidence that Hare's characters have an uncanny resemblance to the real thing. His hard stares at Britain's institutions - the Church of England in Racing Demon, the tabloid press in Pravda - are so well-researched that his critics have sniffed that he's a better journalist than playwright. Before the opening night of Pravda, a 1985 collaboration with provocative British playwright Howard Brenton about a Rupert Murdoch-like press baron, the show's producers were so nervous about the similarities that they consulted a libel lawyer. In Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, a 2005 collection of his lectures...
...main character wasn't all bad: as played by Anthony Hopkins, he was the sexiest media monster possible. More often, though, the strength of Hare's villains is in their subtlety. In his work, even the most compromised of characters, like Hanna Schmitz, The Reader's Nazi guard, show glimmers of humanity. The challenge with Schmitz, says Hare, was to make a Nazi move the audience, even as the full horror of her actions unfolds. The trickiest scene - for Hare, Winslet (who plays Schmitz) and director Stephen Daldry - was the war-crimes trial, in which Schmitz is accused of killing...