The last
time David Hare brought a brand new play to Edinburgh was almost half a century
ago, when he was in his early 20s. That was with Portable Theatre, the
collective formed by Hare and fellow young radicals in the heat of the revolutionary
possibilities fired by the events of 1968. Now, aged 72, Hare has just opened his
epic reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the National Theatre of Great
Britain in London prior to an Edinburgh International Festival run. This sees
James McArdle leading a mainly Scots cast as the youthful fantasist who embarks
on a series of adventures before his older self is forced to reconnect with
everything he left behind.
“It’s a
massive undertaking,” says Hare. “With something like this you either go
minimalist or maximalist, and we’ve gone maximalist. It’s a bit of a monster,
but I think we’ve tamed it.”
Hare
begins his new version of the play in twenty-first century Scotland, with the
action moving from Dunoon to Florida, Egypt, the Bay of Biscay and beyond.
“What
appealed to me about it is that Peter Gynt is a fabulist and a story-teller,
and in these days of the internet and social media, everyone can invent their
own story and access their own journey.”
Much of
Hare’s new take on things comes from a personal root.
“My
mother was from Paisley,” he says, “and we used to go to Scotland all the time,
but I ended up writing in this English voice, so writing this play in a
Scottish voice, and in my mother’s accent, was incredibly liberating.”
Hare
recognises elements of himself as well in the play’s title character.
“I think
I was probably a lonely child, and I did fantasise,’ he says. “I spent all the
time thinking about the life I wanted to live, but I also think I was hit by a
dose of reality much earlier than Peter Gynt was. The fascination in the play
is the stages he goes through. He becomes a capitalist, and even in the
nineteenth century Ibsen was saying that the effect of capitalism was that we
would become more alone. He predicted the whole emphasis today on going it
alone, and on self-fulfilment, self-promotion and self-absorption.”
Hare has
embarked on quite a journey of his own over the last half century. His beginnings
with Portable saw him direct compendiums of Kafka and Strindberg before
presenting plays of his own or his contemporaries at Edinburgh’s long-lost Pool
lunchtime theatre and the Traverse.
In an act
of collectivism typifying the times, Hare teamed up with contemporaries Howard Brenton,
Snoo Wilson, Stephen Poliakoff, Trevor Griffiths, Brian Clark and Hugh Stottart
to co-write Lay By, which explored attitudes to pornography and sexual violence
in society. Even in 1971, the show’s provocative material shocked many.
“There
were a whole lot of shocking plays we used to do late at night that caused a
lot of furore,” says Hare of his youthful endeavours. “There were two sides to
the fringe movement. One side was Bacchanalian, and was made up of those who
had this hippy ideal of being free and being able to indulge yourself, who
believed that having a good time could change society, and that somehow because
of these freedoms, society could be mysteriously improved. Then there was
another side who believed that political action could change things.”
When
Hare’s play, Slag, was seen at the Royal Court, it set him on a path that would
see him become a major presence in British theatre. Plays such as Plenty
appeared in the West End and on Broadway, while a relationship with the National
Theatre saw the likes of The Secret Rapture investigate the personal and the
political in the thick of Thatcherism. A
trilogy – Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War – dissected the
Church of England, the British judiciary and a Labour Party in freefall.
More
recently, South Downs was a response to Terence Rattigan’s The Browning
Version, while The Moderate Soprano looked at John Christie, the founder of
Glyndebourne Opera and his romance and marriage with singer Audrey Mildmay. In
2018, Hare’s seventeenth new play for the National, I’m Not Running, looked at
the two separate paths taken by would-be leaders of the Labour Party.
“This
doesn’t relate to Peter Gynt directly,” Hare says, “but there have been immense
social improvements since the 1960s. “People were extremely repressive and
judgemental, and people killed thought because they weren’t allowed to be who
they were. Of course, there are all these awful things going on in America and
elsewhere, but I think we’re much more socially empowered that we were then. It’s
why Brexit’s nostalgia for the 1950s doesn’t wash with me.”
In this
respect, Hare’s play sounds like a thoroughly modern Peter Gynt.
“The
important thing is to knock on the head this idea that a spiritual journey is a
journey you take alone,” he says. “I think that has become a fashionable idea
in the twenty-first century, that you can grow your own garden, but I don’t
think that’s the case. In my life, my garden has grown through sharing things
with other people, and anything important in it has come from that. I don’t
think the idea of being rich, famous and alone is a good way to be.”
Peter
Gynt runs at the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre of Great Britain,
London until July 16, then opens at Edinburgh International Festival at the
Festival Theatre, August 1-9, 7-10.45pm, August 4, 7, 9, 10, 12.30-4.15pm,
before returning to the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre of Great
Britain, London from August 16-October 8.
The Herald, July 13th 2019
ends
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