DAVID HARE, EXPLORER
Weales, Gerald
Stage NAP READING DAVID HARE, EXPLORER WHEN Mel Gussow wrote his account of David Hare's work in the New York Times Magazine (September 29, 1985), the article was called "Playwright as...
...It is why the final flashback of Plenty, the moment of bright promise at the end of World War II, is not only an ironic comment in the face of the Susan we have watched destroying herself and others, but a promise still...
...She is an image of disorder in its best (life-bringing) and worst (chaos-bringing) senses...
...The contest between Mehta and Andrews is not simply one of principle...
...Her freedom from guilt is finally recognized by her as a product of her unwillingness to make choices...
...The thing that many critics and players find troubling in Hare's work is that he gives them no clear place to stand...
...most of the time, the actress hovers like an eager new waiter who has just dropped a tray of dishes...
...That possibility lies behind the schoolteacher's "we madmen" speech at the end of Wetherby, her call to return to the books which, on the evidence of the film, Commonweal: 704 have failed to sustain the characters...
...She is one of the most incomprehensible characters in A Map of the World, and Elizabeth McGovern's eccentric playing of her does not help...
...Peggy is a kind of slut-saint who suggests Susan's friend in Plenty or the young woman who moves in on the protagonist of Hare's film Wetherby...
...Yet, as Hare's Plenty indicates, audiences are reluctant to identify with a muddied image...
...The conference will end in compromise in any case, the helpful gestures of the "haves" hedged by the condescension of power, the reluctant acceptance of the "have-nots" by the demands for rhetorical if not actual independence...
...Ideally, one should recognize that Andrews's high-minded whine disguises genuine feeling and Mehta's wit and style an avoidance of commitment to anyone or anything outside his art...
...From the beginning of his career, he has been conducting an abrasive diagnosis of the ills of postwar England, but his plays and films do not offer a cure, only a longing for better health...
...Artists are customarily praised for their complexity and ambiguity, but political playwrights are presumed to have answers, certainties that one can embrace or denounce...
...In Knuckle (1974), a parody of the HammettChandler-Ross Macdonald kind of thriller, Hare's good-bad guy, unlike his counterpart in Bogart movies, is defeated by a society too wicked for the individual to fight...
...In the end, the Mehta-Andrews confrontation simply dissolves...
...Stage NAP READING DAVID HARE, EXPLORER WHEN Mel Gussow wrote his account of David Hare's work in the New York Times Magazine (September 29, 1985), the article was called "Playwright as Provocateur...
...A suggestion, I am afraid, that everything I have written here is a contribution to the political, moral, sexual, and artistic confusions that so intoxicate Hare...
...Roshan Seth, as Mehta, and Zeljko Ivanek, as Andrews, give excellent performances, so nicely conceived that audience sympathy tends to split according to the individual playgoer's prejudices about manner as well as matter...
...The central conflict is between Victor Mehta, a celebrated comic novelist who writes about his native India from his comfortable English country home, and Stephen Andrews, a correspondent for a leftist literary magazine who suffers from an excess of feeling and platitude...
...GERALD weales 20 December 1985: 705...
...Andrews gives up Peggy as well as an attempt to persuade Mehta that he should read a statement defining fiction as falsehood so that his remarks will be acceptable to the third-world delegates...
...Andrews is as untidy as Mehta is fastidious, sloppy in dress and thought, disenchanted with himself and his society...
...It is Peggy Whitton, the free-spirited American actress, who persuades them to settle their differences in a man-to-man, mind-to-mind contest for which she will be the prize...
...Mehta is meticulous in dress and speech, an acid commentator on the imperfect third world from which he comes, an advocate and embodiment of order and rationality...
...Andrews grows up in the course of the play, or so he says in the final confrontation between the two men...
...In A Map of the World the uncertainties of both the world and the playwright are made explicit as one character after another speaks his heart or his mind or his cause only to have his words undercut by the next speaker or by himself...
...Not that even, but Hare's play as a comment on making a movie about . . . and what do all those layers of misinterpretation and misunderstanding add up to...
...It is the very muted sound of hope in Mehta's final gesture, accepting the actors who, in the frame plot, are falsifying his account of events in Bombay...
...he has been killed in a gratuitous train wreck as though not only Western society and its third-world copycats but the universe were in league against positive change...
...His a very tentative statement, the best that one can expect from Hare...
...Not only has Andrews been unable to better his world...
...It is a softer Mehta who appears at the end of the play, one who still recognizes all that is corrupt and self-deluding in the work but who does not use that knowledge as a defense against life and feeling...
...Yet, for all of Knuckle, Hare clings to the romantic possibility implicit in the borrowed figure...
...Andrews's convenient offstage death draws Mehta from the conference, keeping him from speaking...
...That is not the case with Hare...
...Perhaps because he comes to recognize what is best in Mehta, he begins to see his verbal concern for the poor and dispossessed as a kind of self-indulgence...
...Mehta, in his turn, sees that his rectitude is an excluding device that in separating him from imperfection separates him from life...
...It is an apt label if it can be extended or weakened to include not only Peter Hall' s description of Hare as '' one of the great disturbers'' but also one who provokes in the sense of exasperates...
...Audiences of both the play and the movie version of Plenty tend to divide between those who see Susan as a victim and those who see her as a representative of the society she detests...
...She is presumably both...
...This accident saves the participants from embarrassment, but it is clear that his speaking or not is unimportant...
...He renounces the quarrel and proposes to act rather than talk, although he and the play are never very clear about the nature of his proposed action...
...What we get, then, are not those events nor Mehta's fictional version of them, but the play's reduction of them to a sellable story: world politics and ideological morality as a love triangle...
...They meet in Bombay in 1978, at a conference on poverty at which, somewhat incredibly, Mehta has been invited to give the keynote address and, somewhat more credibly, Andrews moves from irritated observer to mischief-making participant...
Vol. 112 • December 1985 • No. 22
