Blue Touch Paper

David Hare has long been one of Britain’s best-known screenwriters and dramatists. He’s the author of more than thirty acclaimed plays that have appeared on Broadway, in the West End, and at the National Theatre. He wrote the screenplays for the hugely successful films The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader. Most recently, his play Skylight won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival on Broadway. Now, in his debut work of autobiography, “Britain’s leading contemporary playwright” (Sunday Times) offers a vibrant and affecting account of becoming a writer amid the enormous flux of postwar England. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humor, he takes us from his university days at Cambridge to the swinging 1960s, when he cofounded the influential Portable Theatre in London and took a memorable road trip across America, to his breakthrough successes as a playwright amid the political ferment of the ’70s and the moment when Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of the decade. Through it all, Hare sets the progress of his own life against the dramatic changes in postwar England, in which faith in hierarchy, religion, empire, and the public good all withered away. Filled with indelible glimpses of such figures as Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Helen Mirren, and Joseph Papp, The Blue Touch Paper is a powerful evocation of a society in transition and a writer in the making.

"A master class in how private reckonings sometimes find their greatest resonance on the stage.", "A highly articulate and probing self-examination that is at the same time a vivid cultural study of postwar Britain.", "An intelligent, unsentimental glimpse inside the creative process. . . . [A] sometimes abrasive, always engaging account of [Hare’s] changing dramatic ideals.", "[Hare] has a lightness of touch and a casual eloquence that might surprise those familiar with [his] knotty, politically engaged dramas. . . . He also tosses in enough juicy backstage stories.", "What’s extraordinary about The Blue Touch Paper is how much intellection and drama and sensibility and wit Mr. Hare squeezes into [it]. This is no butterfly-watching stroll through a life. Mr. Hare is a man who seizes on details and ideas, and who writes as if words matter."

David Hare has written more than thirty plays, including Skylight, Amy’s View, The Blue Room, and Stuff Happens. His screenplays, including The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader, have twice been nominated for an Academy Award and three times for the Golden Globes. He lives in London.