The Blue Touch Paper

Review But this is, throughout, an invigorating memoir, an elegantly unvarnished tale. It is fascinating to learn that Hare discovered a talent for dialogue before he had written a play. The account of the legendary Portable Theatre Company is absorbing too, filling one with nostalgia for an age when travelling light was easy. And his account of his vain attempts to sell vacuum cleaners in the US as a young man is priceless. -- Kate Kellaway ― The Observer It's an intoxicating read for those, like me, who missed out on the careless abandon and furious optimism of that era, when artists thought they could make art, change the world and have fun (and sex) all at the same time....By the end of the book Margaret Thatcher is in power and the white-faced mimes have turned on David for his determination to write plays that people want to see. But the enthusiasm with which he later leapt at Stuff Happens never deserts him, and infects every page of this terrific book. -- Nicholas Hytner ― Evening Standard an engrossing, authentic and vivid portrait of those long-lost times. **** -- James Walton ― The Telegraph Yet Hare's complications help to make this a marvellous read, full of wisdom about theatre, and with a candour about his own bad behaviour that brings tears to the eyes as he risks becoming just another absentee dad as the narrative ends with his divorce and a new government in 1979. Hare knows he's trouble, for good and for ill. The Blue Touch Paper reminds us that he's worth it. -- Dominic Maxwell ― The Times it is an interesting social history....But it will be of particular fascination to anyone who loves actors, writers and directors. The cameo appearances from Bill Nighy, Tom Stoppard and Helen Mirren, the gossipy details of pioneering touring company Portable and of life at the newly-opened National Theatre with Peter Hall, not to mention friendships with Tennessee Williams and Philip Roth (revealed as a one-time regular at the Notting Hill Spudulike), are a delight. -- Louise Jury ― The Independent I've enjoyed the book so much, in fact, that I've already re-read great swathes of it forwards and backwards. It's sure to become a classic tale of a life in the theatre of our time. -- Michael Coveney ― What's On Stage For those interested in postwar Britain or modern British theatre,.. the text is filled with plenty. -- Mark Lawson ― The New Statesman Honest, thoughtful and thought-provoking . . . As part of his reflections on his life so far, Hare takes aim at critics and modern parenting - "a dippy celebration of children as little unfallen gods" - and the smothering suffocation of institutions and places (Bexhill-on-Sea, for example, where he grew up), and he is unflinching in shining the spotlight on himself. Everything about the writer Hare is, the vulnerabilities of the artist when putting work into the public eye, the changing nature of theatre, is here. -- Kate Mosse ― Guardian Product Description When, in 2000, the National Theatre published its poll of the hundred best plays of the 20th century, David Hare had written five of them. Yet he was born in 1947 into an anonymous suburban street in Hastings. It is a world he believes to be as completely vanished as Victorian England. Now in his first panoramic work of memoir, ending as Margaret Thatcher comes to power in 1979, David Hare describes his childhood, his Anglo-Catholic education and his painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist. He sets the progress of his own life against the history of a time in which faith in hierarchy, deference, religion, the empire and finally politics all withered away. Only belief in private virtue remains. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humour, David Hare explores how so radical a shift could have occurred, and how it is reflected in his own lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms - film and theatre. In The Blue Touch Paper David Hare describes a life of trial and error: both ho