On the South bank of the Thames, London's National Theater is presenting a new play by David Hare. The critic on London's Sunday Times--John Peter--responded to it not so much with enthusiasm as with fervor. His review began: "David Hare has written one of the best English plays since the war and established himself as the finest British dramatist of his generation." An "interview" in the program allows Hare to express his own feelings about his generation:
What's noticeable so far about the most popular plays of
this decade is that they . . . have seemed, perhaps
unintentionally, to end up celebrating malign energy. Or
at least they hitch a ride from their villains . . . .I'm
trying in this play, perhaps, to buck the trend."
Warped Blake
What The Secret Rapture has in common with Hare's other work on stage, film and the box is a warped version of William Blake's definition of good and evil. Blake said that evil is the action springing from energy, while good is the passive which obeys reason. Among the silly people who inhabit Hare's theatrical world, it is invariably the energetic and active characters who are, per se, evil. The passive characters are good not because they obey reason (most of them do not), but because they are passive. Energy in this new play of Hare's, especially rational energy, is shown as cruel, unpleasant, and immoral. Passivity as such is good, and has nothing to do with intelligence and reason.
The impression is built in this way: A provincial bookseller has died. As the curtain rises we encounter his sheet-shrouded body on a bed in a bare room. The family is gathering to mourn, and we are rapidly introduced to one daughter, Isobel, who is passive and constantly accused of being judgmental--though she says very little along such lines. Another daughter, Marion, is energetic and Tory (a junior minister in the Thatcher government) and does a lot of the accusing. The idea seems to be that because Isobel is passive and rather saintly, other people (especially Marion) project their own self-accusing attitudes onto her. Marion's husband, Tom, is a Tory businessman, a smug, born-again Christian nitwit who "wants to do business the way Jesus would have done it." He works in the City of London and is a shark, despite his pretensions to morality.
The dead bookseller has left his country house to Katherine, the mistress whom he married not long before dying. She is very upset by the death--shattered, in fact. She does not know what to do with her life. She is also energetic, destructively so--in short, more than a little bit evil. The saintly Isobel, who runs a small design firm with her lover, Irwin, agrees help poor Katherine by giving her a PR job, despite the fact that the firm does not want or need any more PR. It is simply a saintly gesture. The evil woman somehow arranges for the firm to expand, using funds from the conglomerate run by Marion's husband. Isobel is not keen, but the promise of more money corrupts Irwin, so it all goes through.
The expansion causes the firm to overextend. Disaster portends when Katherine loses a vital account by staging an insane scene in a
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