David Hare makes a particularly revealing comment in his programme note for the adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking that he first directed on Broadway last year and has now brought to the National Theatre (where it opened last night) about what he thought when he was first approached to do the job: “It was easy enough to spend a few hours reading a book about death which you could let flop in one hand while nursing a scotch in the other. But how would it be to spend months in the gruelling Broadway system - endless previews, needless hysteria, erratic critics - in the company of a 72-year-old first-time playwright whose agony of grief was plainly so raw? Wasn’t the prospect… well, rather austere? So it’s hard to explain my own reaction - the one you have before you can think - was that the whole thing sounded, in prospect, highly enjoyable.”
That apparent perversity - of seeing pleasure in dealing with pain - is also one that underpins the whole love-hate relationship that artists like Hare have with Broadway itself, and which he alludes to himself in calling it a gruelling system. But apart from the narcissism of seeing it as all about him - and why shouldn’t it be, I suppose, given that is writing about his choice of whether to take it on or not - there’s also his complaints about that system, which he promptly itemises.
“Endless previews” are one of his complaints. Yet he ends his piece with a startling story. “When I look back on our time in New York, nothing in it seems more significant than the moment at which, somewhat late in the process, we asked ourselves why the play had been written at all. We were sitting in the Booth, probably at an afternoon rehearsal during the preview period, watching Vanessa [Redgrave] up on stage telling us once more about her moody Irish husband and her beautiful, volatile daughter. The author and director had one of those psychic moments at which two people think the same thing. Joan pointed one of her spidery fingers at the stalls. ‘Wouldn’t this be better,’ she asked, ‘if it were less about me? And more about them?’ Next day, she inserted the blazing admonishment with which the play opens.”
So there’s an immediate vindication for the preview process he started out deploring. It leads you to make discoveries about the play you are putting on. (And, for the record, the play previewed on Broadway for just over three weeks - from March 6, 2007, before opening on March 29, though since of course critics are admitted ahead of the official opening, the show would have been “frozen” a few days before).
As for his charge of “needless hysteria”, Broadway is fuelled by hope and hype - those are the very flames that draw the moths to it in the first place. If you want to work more sedately, go elsewhere. But it’s his last throwaway remark - the erratic critics - that requires more scrutiny. Hare is famously thin-skinned when it comes to his critics - Michael Billington tells a story in a Theatrevoice discussion on Hare’s work that when he gave a rather “sniffy notice” to his early play The Great Exhibition in 1972, “At 8:10 a.m. that morning my phone rang and it was David barking down the telephone at me, and this was my first encounter with the prickly side.”
Richard Eyre, who directed that and other early plays and many of his subsequent ones when he was running the National, later replies in the same discussion: “I wasn’t aware of the 8:10 phone call, but I believe it. It’s just that all of us engaged in this profession at some stage feel that wild, wounded fury and deal with it in different ways, and try not to ring you up at ten past eight in the morning. And some part of me admires the fact that David comes out in the open with it and actually stands his ground and takes on, you know, as he did famously and I thought insanely, took on Frank Rich of The New York Times, and took him on and I think not entirely certainly on the right grounds. But it’s sort of, if you like, a kind of magnificent folly that somebody is going to care so much about their work to, as it were, to be prepared to pick up weapons and assault on behalf of his work.”
Eyre is referring to the infamous spat between Hare and the then-chief critic of the New York Times in 1989, when Hare’s play The Secret Rapture was produced on Broadway, and though Rich had admired it at its National Theatre premiere, didn’t like it in New York (where, to make things even more personal, it had starred Hare’s then-partner, Blair Brown). Rich would later put his side of the story, saying that Hare “had mutilated his own fine play The Secret Rapture by miscasting and misdirecting the New York production. (The play had been beautifully staged by Howard Davies in London.) Hare wrote an open letter to me that he distributed to the press, arguing that it was part of my job ‘to insure the survival of the theater’ and ‘support … the continuance of the serious play on Broadway.’ I wrote back that ‘my responsibility’ was ‘to be honest with The Times’s readers,’ who were too smart to follow any critic with blind Pavlovian slavishness, but instead extrapolated according to their own tastes from a familiar critic’s point of view.”
Rich goes on to point out, “The dispute made for great copy and landed me on the front page of publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Variety (where Hummler wrote a tendentious story with a classic headline, ‘Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch’). Hare was seconded by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who, though I had never met him, told reporters that I had not liked the performance given by his wife, Sarah Brightman, in The Phantom of the Opera, because I was bitter about my own pending divorce. (Webber’s divorce from Brightman was yet to come.) When ‘60 Minutes’ did a segment about me, Hare and Lloyd Webber were both heard from, with the latter delivering, in the correspondent Morley Safer’s words, an ‘unprintable tirade’ off-camera, questioning my ‘integrity, sexuality and sanity.’ Even the stroke-impaired Merrick made a cameo appearance, labeling me ‘a savage dog.’”
Hare has not given up that combative streak, and especially that longstanding grudge against the New York Times. Last year the New York Post reported a “screaming match” between Hare and the New York Times’ managing editor Jill Abramson over the paper’s theatre coverage. According to the story, Hare told Abramson that her paper “has contempt for the theatre, especially Broadway, and especially plays.” When Abramson reportedly replied, “It is not our obligation to like or care about the theatre. It’s our obligation to arbitrate it. We are the central arbiter of taste and culture in the city of New York.” Hare in turn answered, “If you believe that, you are even more out of touch than your newspaper appears. You have a critic who despises the theatre.”
Scott Rudin, the Broadway producer who had suggested that Didion adapt The Year of Magical Thinking for the stage and then invited Hare to direct it, defends Hare’s position: “I’m entirely in favour of artists questioning the power and influence of critics. Most people are afraid to. David is not.” But if Hare is willing to take on his critics, I wonder if he could also take on the audiences.
After the mobile phone outrage that happened at Tuesday’s Royal Court opening of The City that I reported on here yesterday, I’m starting to wonder whether audiences anywhere are able to concentrate anymore: even at a National Theatre first night, filled with supporters and theatre professionals, I have seldom experienced a more disruptive lot than the one in attendance at last night’s opening of The Year of Magical Thinking - accentuated, of course, by the stillness of the play (most of it delivered from a wooden seat in the middle of the stage) and the utter concentration it demands (and should command).
A man a few rows back repeatedly snored (and I don’t think it was Quentin Letts, even though he has in the past confessed to getting some shut-eye in this very theatre); but the coughers provided a constant percussion to the play, too. At one point the most persistent of them was even loudly admonished: “Put your hand in front of you mouth when you cough!” Perhaps it was Hare, trying to hound out bad behaviour…..
Not me, guv - honest!
It was an old man (80ish by the look of him) who was sitting behind the Sun's Bill Hagerty. How Bill's patience managed not to snap I will never know.
As for you, Shenton, I will get you back. Some day. Some time. Some how. You will not be able to sleep soundly - if we can say that in this context - until then...
Quentin.