Skylight

The Author David Hare

Playwright Sir David Hare was born in Bexhill, East Sussex, England on 5 June 1947, and was educated at Lancing College and Jesus College, Cambridge. He co-founded Portable Theatre Company, acting, directing and writing plays. Slag was first produced in London in 1970 at the Hampstead Theatre Club. He was Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1970-1 and Resident Dramatist at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1973. He co-founded Joint Stock Theatre Group with David Aukin and Max Stafford-Clark in 1975, and held a US/UK Bicentennial Fellowship in 1977. He has been Associate Director of the National Theatre since 1984. He was knighted in 1998 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His plays include Knuckle (1974), winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fanshen (1975), based on the book by William Hinton; Plenty (1978), a portrait of disillusionment in post-war Britain, first staged at the National Theatre in London; Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (1985), an attack on the English press written with Howard Brenton; The Secret Rapture (1988); the trilogy Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993), about three British institutions: the Anglican church, the legal system and the Labour party; Skylight (1995); Amy's View (1997); and The Judas Kiss (1998).

He has also adapted Chekhov's Platonov and Ivanov, Schnitzler's La Ronde (The Blue Room) and Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children for the theatre. In 1998 (and again in 2002) he performed his own play, Via Dolorosa, a monologue about a visit he made to Israel and the Palestinian Territories for the Royal Court Theatre. His experiences of acting and writing the play are further explored in a diary, Acting Up: A Diary, published in 1999. More recent plays by David Hare include My Zinc Bed, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in September 2000, and The Breath of Life (2002). A new play, The Permanent Way (2003), the story of a political dream turned sour, explores the privatisation of British Rail, and opened at the Royal National Theatre in January 2004.

His film work includes the screenplay for the screen adaptation of Plenty in 1985, and he wrote and directed the films Wetherby (1985), Paris by Night (1988) and Damage (1992).

Sir David Hare lives in London. His papers were acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin in 1993.

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