The Secret Rapture

Description

An elderly antiquarian bookseller has just died at his home in the country. His two daughters come to attend to things. Isobel, who has been nursing him, is a partner in a small design firm. Marion is in politics - already a junior minister. It is Marion's profession to provide answers, and to back those who offer solutions, but not all human situations yield to a professional approach - least of all when they involve their junior step-mother Katherine.In this elegantly constructed play, a mordant comedy of manners deepens into a painfully unsparing examination of the consequences of applying principled pragmatism to human feelings.'David Hare has written one of the best English plays since the war and established himself as the finest British dramatist of his generation.' John Peter, Sunday Times

David Hare is one of Britain's most internationally performed playwrights. Born in Sussex in 1947, he had a long association with Britain's National Theatre, which produced eleven of his plays successively between 1978 and 1997. A trilogy about the church, the law and the Labour Party - Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War - was presented in repertory at the Olivier Theatre in 1993. Nine of his best-known plays, including Plenty, The Secret Rapture, Skylight, The Blue Room, Amy's View, The Judas Kiss and Via Dolorosa - in which he performed - have also been performed on Broadway. David Hare's most recent play, The Breath of Life, premi red at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, in October 2002.