The Blue Touch Paper
A Memoir
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
When, in 2000, the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. Yet he was born in 1947 into an anonymous suburban street in Hastings. It is a world he believes to be as completely vanished as Victorian England.
Now in his first panoramic work of memoir, ending as Margaret Thatcher comes to power in 1979, David Hare describes his childhood, his Anglo-Catholic education and his painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist. He sets the progress of his own life against the history of a time in which faith in hierarchy, deference, religion, the empire and finally politics all withered away. Only belief in private virtue remains.
In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humour, David Hare explores how so radical a shift could have occurred, and how it is reflected in his own lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms - film and theatre. In The Blue Touch Paper David Hare describes a life of trial and error: both how he became a writer and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Insightful and articulate British writer and playwright Hare (Obedience, Struggle, and Revolt) succeeds with this engaging memoir. His story charms with self-deprecation, understatement, and laugh-out-loud moments, sometimes tinged with sadness. Sent away to school as a youngster, he felt "sustained excitement at being out in the world." For the rest of his life, though he's often been "dissatisfied" with himself, he has "almost never been bored." He writes that he "stumbled on a gift for writing dialogue." He confides that a routine would be essential "for those... working at below genius level," and for 40 years has aimed to sit down at his desk every weekday at 9 a.m. Hare reflects on Britain of the 1960s and '70s, observing that "many of contemporary history's most important changes were being wrought by feminism." He doesn't think much of critics or academics. He takes readers through his fear of failure, physical distress, and the unraveling of his marriage. In a hilarious section about his play Teeth n' Smiles, he casts Helen Mirren as a rock singer even though she can't sing. In this exceptionally perceptive and gratifying read, Hare appropriately writes that "the excitement and fun of theater is never in the play itself but in the transaction."
