The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir
Authors and Contributors      By (author) David Hare
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:368
Dimensions(mm): Height 197,Width 129
Category/GenreFilms and cinema
Memoirs
Literary studies - plays and playwrights
ISBN/Barcode 9780571294343
ClassificationsDewey:822.914
Audience
General
Edition Main

Publishing Details

Publisher Faber & Faber
Imprint Faber & Faber
NZ Release Date 29 March 2023
Publication Country United Kingdom

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 how he became a writer and the high price he and those around him paid for that decision.

Author Biography

David Hare is the author of 30 full-length plays for the stage, seventeen of which have been presented at the National Theatre. They include Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy's View, The Blue Room and Stuff Happens. His many screenplays for film and television include The Hours, The Reader, Page Eight, Turks Caicos and Salting the Battlefield.