Emotional Strategist of the Stage

LONDON —  She is Kyra, a teacher who lives to help the disadvantaged. She is someone who cares. He is Tom, an entrepreneur who embodies go-go capitalism. He is an achiever. Once they were lovers.

Playwright David Hare, who created these attracting stage opposites, will be fascinated to see whether it is Tom or Kyra who evokes most audience empathy when “Skylight” opens in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday. Ambivalence would not dismay him.

“I don’t think there is any interest in plays where the playwright is finger-wagging about one kind or person or another,” Hare says. “If there’s any vitality in what you write, then you have mixed feelings, just as you have mixed feelings in life.”

In London’s theater world, the feelings about Hare are almost universally good. He is prolific, political, passionate, praised. Critic Matthew Sweet, writing in the Independent, sighs that Hare is by now a bit like Britain’s Queen Mum--above criticism.

At 50, Hare is at the top of his remarkable game. “Skylight,” written in 1995, is at the Vaudeville in the West End. “His work is ripening and deepening with age,” said critic Charles Spencer, writing in the Daily Telegraph.

Hare’s “Racing Demon,” seen in Los Angeles as part of the Ahmanson at the Doolittle series in 1994, went on to Broadway to earn a Tony nomination for best play. Last season, “Skylight” also got four Tony nominations, including best play. This summer, “Amy’s View” opened at London’s Royal National Theater, and it continues in repertory there now. Hare’s new play about Oscar Wilde, “The Judas Kiss,” directed by Richard Eyre, will debut here early in ‘98, then move to Broadway.

There’s more. Last spring, fighting writers’ isolation, Hare traveled with barnstorming politicians to write a daily commentary for a national newspaper about Britain’s election campaign.

A bright afternoon finds him sipping fruit juice in the tiny bar of the Almeida Theater in Islington, London’s off-Broadway. He is back from vacation with his wife, designer Nicole Farhi, for a matinee of “Heartbreak House” by George Bernard Shaw. The director: David Hare. “A brilliant and breathtaking new staging,” said critic Sheridan Morley.

Hare has been working at the heart of the British theater for 29 years. Now, as one of the country’s leading playwrights, he marches confidently toward distant horizons.

“By 50, everything in your life is charged with memory and in a way memory does the work for you,” he says. “Every street corner you turn, every bar you walk into, every person you see is redolent with a past, and any halfway decent writer can express that sense of the sadness of time passing--life does the work for you.”

The playwright’s charge, Hare says, is to produce “thoughtful plays that make you think about your own life and the lives of other people in the audience.” Two decades ago, there were 30 or 40 English playwrights writing that sort of play. Today, there are many fewer, Hare laments.

When British newspapers characterize Hare, the phrase “fashionable left-wing playwright” wafts behind his name like yesterday’s incense. His plays, like his seven original films and screenplays, his books and articles, have sawed at the establishment--the press, the church, the government, the courts.

“David’s generation and mine inherited the post-1945 dream of the world that promised everything. . . . What happened in the end of the ‘60s was bitter disillusionment. The desire to anathematize made David a moralist,” director Eyre told a British reporter.

Now, though, it seems to some critics that in his recent work Hare has crossed that fine line between rebel outsider and mainstream voice.

Hare demurs. “I don’t think my politics have changed very much. I think the strategy by which I write has changed,” Hare says as the bar fills with theater-goers come to see him do Shaw.

“My plays are less overtly polemical than they were in the ‘70s, but that’s because I think I’ve begun to talk about more difficult things about which there aren’t easy answers,” he says. “The desire for social justice doesn’t go away just because the Berlin Wall has fallen. People still want their societies to be fair.”

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In a media-driven, materialistic world, argues Hare the socialist, people still realize that love, grief and fulfillment are more important than consumerist gratification. It is the job of the theater to make that point, he believes. “Skylight” hammers it home.

“Other media can’t or won’t speak about these things. Hollywood no longer speaks about these subjects, or, if it does, it produces films about grief that are perfectly hackneyed,” Hare says. “The theater is the place you go for discussion not only about how people live, but how they ought to live, and that’s why the theater to me is so incredibly important.”

Jim Harley, in the BBC magazine the Listener, noted: “David Hare is a writer to the left, but as a stylist he belongs to the old school. What distinguishes him is a breathtaking ability to spin intricate theatrical debates right across an evening. . . . “

The debates in “Skylight” are about private passions and public persuasions. They examine “whether it is possible to go back once the circumstances of a love have changed,” the author says.

It is a love story, but it is the universal lament of those who serve the public but who feel undervalued in buy-more societies. The themes intertwine as Tom and Kyra duel in a conflict between loving one person, in particular, and loving people, in general.

Hare gets annoyed when people suggest that he is using his characters’ love in “Skylight” to peddle ideas. “The love story is as important to me as anything else in the play. As human beings, we are all these things, we are lovers and thinkers, and it seems to me that when you write plays they should be about people’s private as well as their public lives,” he said.

“Skylight,” which plays on a single set--a grimy, unheated apartment on a cruel winter’s night--is only 2 years old but has already been performed in countries as distant from lower-class London as Turkey, Uruguay, Greece, South Africa, Belgium, Spain and Romania.

In New York, Hare expected the audience to identify with the entrepreneur. Instead, they responded even more strongly to the aggrieved caring soul than in Britain.

But audiences are as different as the cultures and circumstances that create them, Hare has learned. “ ‘Skylight’ has played all over the world and there’s a completely different response to the play according to which country it’s playing. It seems to speak to every different culture,” he says with a last swallow of juice as Hare the dramatist becomes Hare the director.

* “Skylight” opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772. Shows are Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 26. $29-$37.