by David Hare
DAVID HARE
Plays Three
Skylight
Amy’s View
The Judas Kiss
My Zinc Bed
Introduced by the author
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Skylight
First Performance
Characters
Epigraph
Act One
Scene One
Scene Two
Act Two
Scene One
Scene Two
Amy’s View
First Performance
Characters
Epigraph
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
The Judas Kiss
First Performance
The Background to the Play
Characters
Epigraph
Act One: Deciding to Stay
Scene One
Scene Two
Act Two: Deciding to Leave
Scene One
Scene Two
My Zinc Bed
First Performance
Characters
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introduction
The editors at Faber & Faber
talk to the author about the plays in this collection
How did you come to write Skylight?
Oh, the usual way – an image. A spluttering gas boiler on the wall, and a woman in a kind of voluntary exile, making life hard for herself. Very powerful, very evocative for me.
You’d spent your whole life as a writer avoiding plays set in rooms.
That’s right. Perhaps I finally opted for a play with walls because I was exhausted by writing three huge plays for the Olivier Theatre – Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War – and I was alive to the feeling that it’s hard to characterise with density in an epic play. Yes, plainly, in The Life of Galileo or Mother Courage Brecht brings off great central characters – two of the greatest in literature – but he’s careless, to say the least, in the way he flings minor characters on and off the stage. I was aware that my plays had become restless, always subject to the pressure of time, to the demands of narrative. Sometimes I was finding it easier to move on than to move in. In an epic play the scene you are writing is always waiting to be replaced by another. This creates a wonderful energy when properly done – the slate is wiped clean many times in the evening – but it can also mean that the people you create are not able to put down roots on the stage.
Skylight is not quite a classic two-hander.
I couldn’t resist a little embellishment. Maybe it was shame at succumbing to the notion of writing a play in real time, so that’s why I give the play a little kick of context at the beginning and at the end with the appearance of the son, Edward.
Do you think of it as a romantic play?
Most certainly.
A love story?
Not just a love story – I mean romantic in the proper sense, a play about people’s limitless potential.
Do you think that accounts for its popularity?
I have no idea. Back in the 1980s, the critic of the Daily Mail, Jack Tinker, claimed I was not a proper playwright because my plays had prospered only in the hothouse of subsidy. Put them in the harsher climate of the commercial theatre and they would die. To my surprise, as much as to his, he turned out to be wrong. Three of the plays in this collection were profitable hits on Broadway. However, they were written to exactly the same criteria as my previous work. There was no element of calculation. There never is. When you’re writing a play you have no sense of who it might appeal to. People certainly liked the spectacle of a big man flailing. And, again, three of these plays show big men flailing: Tom Sergeant, Oscar Wilde and Victor Quinn.
Let’s take Sergeant first.
Obviously, the play is driven by the opposition between an entrepreneurial approach to life and an ethic founded in public service. Fortunately, this turned out to be an opposition which audiences understood. In Pravda Howard Brenton and I came up with a phrase, ‘the melancholy of business’. Tom Sergeant embodies that melancholy. I al ways find that the more a businessman tells you everything’s wonderful, the sadder you feel. Another phrase we might have come up with is ‘the melancholy of maleness’ – because Tom is a hopeless male, a man condemned to maleness, and all the ridiculous feelings that go with it. Also, I knew a little bit about restaurants, enough to know they represent capitalist endeavour at its most fleeting and heroic: every night you set out to prove yourself all over.
And Kyra?
Interestingly, when we went to America with the play, we had imagined that audiences would identify with Tom’s get-up-and-go. To the contrary, we uncovered a massive well of anger to which the play spoke – the anger of those in public service who see themselves as overlooked and disregarded by all the callous priorities of the period. I had some modest feeling theatre was doing what it should.
Which is?
Giving heart to the broken-hearted.
Michael Gambon played Tom first, then Bill Nighy.
Yes. And there’s a reprehensible snobbery among those who claim to prefer one or the other in the role. I’m sometimes buttonholed by people who tell me they saw Bill, or they saw Michael, and how superior either one was. In fact, Bill has played so many times in my work that his version of ‘the big man’ couldn’t help but be fascinating. He was actually Gambon’s suggestion when we didn’t know how to replace him: ‘Get the handsome fellow to do it.’ But Gambon was also unforgettable. Lia Williams played Kyra, then Stella Gonet. Both superb.
And you wrote Amy’s View almost immediately after?
I was inspired by the collapse of Lloyd’s. It seemed so quintessentially English. Suddenly Squadron Leaders from Dorset, finding themselves swindled by the well-spoken crooks in the insurance business, were speaking the rhetoric of the most militant trade union leaders. Originally, people assumed the Thatcherite revolution was there to clear away the riff-raff, but now, like all revolutions, it was turning on its own supporters. A certain generation had believed itself entitled to money without having to work for it. There was an expectation that money was like yeast – it would just regenerate itself, and that the less you thought about it, the more morally worthy you were to receive it. And that particular sense of entitlement was deeply embedded in class – as was the kind of light comedy in which Esme Allen had made her name and prospered. I loved using the theatre as a metaphor for life.
But the play was sometimes misunderstood?
To a degree.
People thought it was an example of exactly the kind of old-fashioned theatre the play mocks.
I’d chosen a four-act structure, which is a demanding and interesting form, very rarely used nowadays, also devilishly difficult to bring off. What you don’t show has to be as convincing as what you do – because what has happened between the acts is what gives the action on stage its undertow and power. Unfortunately a few critics couldn’t see past Judi Dench’s performance as Esme. One idiot even managed to suggest that she was writing her own lines – in one sense, you could say, a tribute to Judi’s perfect mastery of the role, but in another, a rather revealing display of the critic’s ignorance of the working practices of the modern theatre.
When the play was revived in 2006 with Felicity Kendal playing Esme, many critics re-e
valuated their first reactions to the play.
This happens a lot.
Why do you think that is?
It seems to take critics ten years before they trust me.
Again, why do you think that is?
It’s not for me to say. The weakest part of the play concerned the young man, Dominic. I often struggle with young men. I find them difficult, in life and on the stage. By the time we took the play from the West End to Broadway, then the Shavian ding-dong in the second act had been sharpened up and Dominic was better drawn. I hate all the clichés of theatre criticism: that a playwright has to love all his characters. Why? Does Shakespeare love Iago? Critics also like to claim that a good play is always evenhanded. Is that really true? I can think of a series of belting plays, incendiary plays which are completely one-sided. Would The Diary of Anne Frank be more powerful if it gave the Nazis better arguments? I don’t think so.
Amy’s View also defends the medium of theatre itself.
Yes, I wrote it at a moment when the theatre-is-dead movement was at its most smug. Clearly, it’s unfortunate that only a certain number of people can see and hear a single play at any one time. Does that make it elitist? Six billion are shut out and eight hundred admitted. What can you do?
Do you think the play itself suffered because of Judi Dench’s performance?
Absolutely not. It glowed, because of her. When Judi read the play, she had no idea why the director Richard Eyre so wanted her to play the part. But as she herself says, it’s in those very plays to which she doesn’t immediately respond that she eventually does her greatest work. For her kind of talent, if things come too easily, they’re not as good. Judi had a terrible struggle – often in tears, often in despair – but the mark of the struggle was in the stature of the performance.
Then a very odd change of direction: you wrote a play about Oscar Wilde.
Yes. Actually, Mike Nichols had asked me to write a film. He thought the modern cinema was ready for a more honest account of the trial than had been possible in the days of Peter Finch or Robert Morley. By chance, I’d studied Wilde at Cambridge because I believed him to be a far more original thinker than was then credited. My tutor responded by telling me that if I made Wilde the subject of my special paper, I would be a laughing stock. Wilde was not a serious writer. I went ahead in the face of his advice. When that tutor himself wrote a play about Wilde which was produced at Hampstead Theatre some years later, I did allow myself a quiet smile. Anyway, I wrote the screenplay, but Mike didn’t like it – not witty enough, he felt. Again, it was Nichols who said, ‘I think it’s a play. You should just do the bit where he’s in exile.’ I’m not a fan of the bio-pic generally, and the bio-play even less, so I chose to concentrate on two moments when Wilde does the inexplicable.
You love the mystery of Wilde.
Oh very much so. The self-knowledge. The agonising self-knowledge. And the dignity of his suffering. He protested, of course he did, and there were moments of terrible degradation and squalor. But there was also heroic resistance, stoicism at its finest. I regard the second act of The Judas Kiss as more or less the best thing I ever wrote.
Not the first?
The first’s a bloody mess, we all knew that – pedalling uphill, so you can sail down. It was hell for the actors. They had to lay out the workings of the relationship in the Cadogan Hotel, immediately before Wilde’s arrest, in order that the audience could comprehend the poetry of Wilde’s resignation at the moment in Naples when he is betrayed by the person for whom he has sacrificed everything. The actors had to work and work in that first act, pretty thanklessly – I was ashamed.
Did you have a sneaking sympathy for Bosie?
Oh yes, yes. Myself, I’ve spent my whole life floundering in situations I don’t understand and for which I’m not morally prepared. Bosie was a young man, many fathoms out of his depth, searching for feelings he couldn’t have been expected to have, and asked to make reciprocal sacrifices for which there was never any prospect of reward. Loved by Wilde, which of us could have done better? What is it Samuel Johnson says about Savage? ‘No one who has not suffered the same misfortunes and persecution as Savage has the right to judge him, nor will any wise man presume to say, “Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived and written better than Savage.”’
Do you think you took on too much with The Judas Kiss?
The first production did. It cast one of Ireland’s most famous heterosexuals as Wilde, and then as Bosie it cast an actor who, however great his talent, did not embody the conventional gay dream of beauty. Both actors – Liam Neeson and Tom Hollander – were outstanding, but given that the author was meanwhile intent on entirely reinventing the myth of Wilde, then the boldness of the casting was bound to add a measure of resistance to what was already a venture against the grain. Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, was kind enough to say this was one of the more convincing representations of his grandfather. In Neil Armfield’s production in Australia, with Bille Browne playing the part, it ran for eight months and became the play for which I’m best known.
Again, My Zinc Bed is a very unexpected play.
Yes. When I’m asked what my plays are about, it’s usually impossible to answer. But of My Zinc Bed, it’s easy – you can say, ‘It’s about alcoholism.’
But it isn’t really, is it?
It’s not a case study. I’m interested in the metaphor of addiction, not in portraying its daily rhythms. Days of Wine and Roses does that, unimprovably. You see, I knew so many people in AA who were telling me they could cure themselves by taking elements of danger and excitement out of their lives. If they weren’t at risk, then they wouldn’t fall. But if you remove those elements, are you really living? Some alcoholics end up living what Marion in The Secret Rapture calls ‘a perfect imitation of life’.
There’s an argument, isn’t there, between those who believe you can control addiction, and those who believe you can only fight it by admitting its control over you?
Yes. Crudely, AA says it’s a disease, a medical condition, and if you have the susceptible gene, you can never win. Will power alone is useless. But Rational Recovery argues that if you surrender will power as your primary instrument of control, then you surrender what makes you human. In the act of trying to save your life, you lose it.
Which side do you come down on?
Look, I went to a good many meetings to research the play and I had great respect for AA. I remember a meeting in a psychiatric ward, listening to people who had a forum to speak – and they were people at the very bottom of the pile, who would have been in trouble with alcohol or with out it. AA gave them a valued place to address their problems. I’m not going to speak against it. On the other hand, I don’t think you can deny that the nature of its cure raises fascinating questions. I understand that after its opening the play was much discussed at AA meetings, and typically the discussions were without rancour, more along the lines of ‘You really ought to see this.’
It’s also partly about new technology.
It was, in its original version. The play as it was presented at the Royal Court was two and a half hours long, with an interval. In 2007 I was asked to write a film adaptation for HBO, and I found a lot of the stuff about the internet and computers rather wearisome and dated. So after I had written the film, I then cut and slightly rewrote the play into a ninety-minute version – straight through – which is the one printed here. It’s not yet been performed. The director of the TV film, Anthony Page, said a few times that he wanted the suggestiveness of a Maupassant short story – that’s what the new version attempts. I don’t normally go in for Audenesque tampering with my own work, but in this case I believe I’ve improved the play.
And at its centre another of your fluent lost souls? In a line from Lambert le Roux in Pravda, through Tom in Skylight, to Oliver Lucas in The Vertical Hour. And a little like Saraffian, the rock manager in Teeth ’n’ Smiles.
I love Victor’s character. The
man who’s lost his faith in communism and is now thrashing around.
Loss of faith is really the theme, isn’t it, more than alcoholism?
I think so.
Why did you direct the stage production yourself?
I’d given up directing, and was enjoying a series of relationships with directors who were bringing nothing but good things to my work – Howard Davies, Richard Eyre, Jonathan Kent, Sam Mendes and Stephen Daldry. But we had a couple of readings while I was writing it and the producer Robert Fox said to me, ‘You plainly care about this play so much you should do it yourself.’ So I did. I persuaded Tom Wilkinson to make one of his now rare appearances on the stage, with Stephen Macintosh as the young poet. Julia Ormond gave a dazzling performance as Elsa. I used to stand on the balcony above Sloane Square, watching hoards of young people arriving for the shows at the rebuilt Royal Court. It was the year 2000. A brand new audience in a great historic theatre. You can’t beat it.
SKYLIGHT
For Nicole
à la folie
Skylight was first performed in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 4 May 1995. The cast was as follows:
Kyra Hollis Lia Williams
Edward Sergeant Daniel Betts
Tom Sergeant Michael Gambon
Director Richard Eyre
Designer John Gunter
Lighting Mark Jonathan
The play transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre, London, on 13 February 1996 with the same cast. It was then presented on Broadway on 10 September 1996 in the same production, with Christian Camargo playing Edward Sergeant and with lighting by Paul Gallo.
The play was subsequently revived at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 14 June 1997 in the original production, with the following cast:
Kyra Hollis Stella Gonet
Edward Sergeant Theo Fraser Steele
Tom Sergeant Bill Nighy
This is the definitive edition of Skylight, incorporating all the textual changes made during its West End and Broadway runs.
