The Blue Touch Paper
A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Extraordinary. . . . This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
David Hare has long been one of Britain’s best-known screenwriters and dramatists. He’s the author of more than thirty acclaimed plays that have appeared on Broadway, in the West End, and at the National Theatre. He wrote the screenplays for the hugely successful films The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader. Most recently, his play Skylight won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival on Broadway.
Now, in his debut work of autobiography, “Britain’s leading contemporary playwright” (Sunday Times) offers a vibrant and affecting account of becoming a writer amid the enormous flux of postwar England. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humor, he takes us from his university days at Cambridge to the swinging 1960s, when he cofounded the influential Portable Theatre in London and took a memorable road trip across America, to his breakthrough successes as a playwright amid the political ferment of the ’70s and the moment when Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of the decade.
Through it all, Hare sets the progress of his own life against the dramatic changes in postwar England, in which faith in hierarchy, religion, empire, and the public good all withered away. Filled with indelible glimpses of such figures as Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Helen Mirren, and Joseph Papp, The Blue Touch Paper is a powerful evocation of a society in transition and a writer in the making.
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."
