Theatre and Argument
David Hare:
Theatre and Storytelling
BARKER vs. DAVID HARE
• Barker wants to throw the audience (and performers) sense of
experience into flux.
• He refuses to cater to what is expected
• He seeks to transform an experience - this is how he
understands the term dramatic; a bewildered audience –
dislocated
• Leading to ‘possibilities’ as their expectations are ‘rinsed out
of them”.
2
BARKER vs. DAVID HARE
• In Barker’s theatre, the audience is relieved of the burden of
being brought to the author’s point of view - who cares? - we
ask the spectator to be imaginative.
• And here , with this last quote Hare and Barker meet.
• And yet their plays and approached appear to be very
different in form and content.
3
DAVID HARE
Why Fabulate?
• Hare’s plays are both fact/ argument & art.
• Hare might also ask what of the ‘collision’ between intellect
and art – but unlike Barker, he does not see a division. The
two live happily side by side.
4
DAVID HARE
Why Fabulate?
• an alternate title might be: in search of truth:
what is the act of theatre?
• Hare occasionally stops and asks : why am i doing
what i am doing (playwriting / producing MORE
stories ) and what is it am i doing?
• [we] sit down to watch actors simulate situation
which producers hope audience will recognise.
• why does it matter whether we call it art or not.
DAVID HARE
Why Fabulate?
•
..we rarely pause to ask whether the consumption of
endless parallel narratives is necessary, and (hare asks
again ) what it is exactly we are doing when we indulge in it
to extraordinary excess.
• Royal Academy member: “Picasso can’t paint a tree”.
• ‘No’ said Picasso ‘He right. I can’t paint a tree. But i can
paint the feeling you have when you look at a tree”.
• Hare states: it is this inner sense – knowing what we know
but able to give it voice and shape – this gift for expressing
the inexpressible – offers the artists his claim of superiority
to somebody who merely documents.
DAVID HARE
Why Fabulate?
•
The audience know they are watching a play.
• By Picasso’s criteria: Hare did not paint the unfolding events in Iraq. He
painted the anger – on both sides- that we feel when we look at the
events.
• Seeing this play made me realise how easy an assumption it is that what
we see on television, presented to us as fact, is in any sense ‘true’.
• hare is arguing that it is precisely because there are so many stories being
told that audiences need to be refreshed.
• why fabulate? “because it already exists. people are all already doing it –
badly. half baked TV – half baked newspaper: The Sun ‘Opinion with
balls”.
DAVID HARE
Why Fabulate?
“And let me be clear, not only do i look to leave
the theatre knowing more, but most
especially i hope to know more about now. ..
a lifetime of storytelling convinces me that
nothing is harder in the arts than to be
contemporary”.
DAVID HARE
metaphor & imagination
• Stuff happens: I have no idea what happened between Bush
and Rice : I invent.
• Beckett does not know Vladimir and Estrogen
• Rules of the game are the same
• If you see a sculpture of wood you recognise it as art
• You do not have to have actually made the wood
• The artist carves the wood
9
BILLINGTON on HARE
• Stuff Happens: A history play which happens
to centre on very recent history.
• Theme: Iraq, Bush administration, a pretext
for invasion and internal opposition.
• Form: mixture of verbatim dialogue with
imaginative speculation.
THEATRE & ARGUMENT
• How can Hare’s approach to argument (and the form it takes
in his plays) help us to understand a relationship between
society and theatre
11
DAVID HARE
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE & REVOLT
•
•
•
•
David Hare’s Obedience, Struggle & Revolt seeks to answer:
What is a political playwright?
What is the relationship between art and politics?
Does theatre have any direct affect on society?
12
HARE, IN HIS OWN WORDS
• David Hare – at LRB book shop, talks about
Obedience, Struggle and Revolt.
• http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/news/11/DavidHare---Obedience-Struggle-and-Revolt.html
DAVID HARE
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE & REVOLT
• The title comes from a Balzac quotation; the three paths in life
available to the young:
• Obedience, is dull,
• revolt is impossible
• struggle is hard.
14
DAVID HARE
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE & REVOLT
• “I love the Balzac quote because he is saying revolt is
impossible. Those of us in 60s were all inflamed by the idea of
revolution”. David Hare
15
DAVID HARE
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE & REVOLT
• Hare presents audiences with spectacles that might move
them with cruel honesty about the world and thereby fight
injustice.
• Better outrage than complacency.
• Better John Osborne than Noel Coward
(Guardian)
16
DAVID HARE
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE & REVOLT
• Hare fears ‘dullness’.
•
He grew up in the 1950s, an era 'stuperfyingly uninteresting
and conformist'. (Guardian)
• Hare's commitment to forging social change, while fed by leftwing doctrine along the way, was clearly born of revulsion at
the torpor of postwar Britain. Nothing is more dangerous in
his eyes than the ease with which our society slips back to a
default position of supine deference to the establishment.
(Guardian).
17
DAVID HARE
• Politics is root of struggle.
• Opinion takes a side. This is political. Theatre/ Theory:
there is no neutral.
• If we agree that Hare is polemical, we might also agree that
it is both his forte
• “These essays aim to make you angry, in a good way - the
same could be said of his plays”. (Guardian)
DAVID HARE
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE & REVOLT
We could approach David Hare in the following context:
• Hare believes politics can be a literary subject
...and we could also approach reading this book in the following
context:
• “I depend on metaphor”. ( LRB talk)
• This is where the art comes into his political writing - no
longer journalism
19
DAVID HARE
from a defence of the new
• ‘observing the audience taught me that whatever
their aesthetic judgement on the plays, there was
a wish to have a place where they could go to see
the currency of present day life set before them
and given some sort of shape. The thirst is there.
I contend that if we fail to satisfy that thirst then
we have no one but ourselves to blame. if theatre
is drifting, then the likely reason is that not
enough good writers are writing good enough
plays’.
•
PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE
• Exploring a public event through the personal
experiences.
• “Examine the political process that promoted
the US and Britain to go to war”.
HARE AND SOCIETY
• His connection to society is that he writes
plays about issues that he sees as important,
relevant and interesting to society.
• Why does he pack theatres?
• He writes about events that are happening
right now, in their society.
HARE AND POPULAR THEATRE
• Why might Hare is revered both here and in
America?
• Howard Barker: “Who”?
WEB SOURCES
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFXJ9yu5
hdc. David Hare on Stuff Happens on ‘Theater
Talk’
• David Hare – at LRB book shop, talks about
Obedience, Struggle and Revolt.
http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/news/11/DavidHare---Obedience-Struggle-and-Revolt.html