Word: hares
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...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...
...People's Playwright Hare stands out as a highly collaborative writer, eager to work closely with directors and actors. It's a legacy of his days on the road with the leftist theater company he co-founded after graduating from Cambridge University. He arrived at Cambridge in 1965 a confirmed Americophile, having spent six mellow months in California. But soon enough he was studying literature with the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, and spending evenings debating how to cause maximum damage to Britain's ruling class - by bombing Buckingham Palace, Parliament or London's financial district...
...Hare's big ideas aren't as revolutionary these days, but his liberal leanings persist. The heroes of his plays are the people left to clean up the messes made by those in power: "priests or policemen, social workers or teachers," he says. Where his earliest works urged the collapse of the capitalist system, his later works are less absolute, exploring "the necessary hypocrisies of public life." With the state of politics today, Hare won't be out of a job anytime soon. But, as he has discovered, sometimes audiences would rather focus on hope than hypocrisy. He frets that...