The History Plays

There is something gloriously British about the phrase The History Plays. It sounds so solid, so educational, so reassuringly upright — as though one were about to receive a tidy procession of Important Events, briskly arranged for the improving reader. But this being David Hare, the title is not really offering a safe schoolmasterly march through the past. It is offering theatre, politics, argument, modern anxiety, public life under pressure, and the sort of sharp intelligence that tends to leave reputations slightly singed.

Published in 1984 by Faber and Faber, this volume gathers Hare in one of his natural habitats: examining Britain, its institutions, its illusions, and the elaborate performance by which public seriousness is often maintained. Hare has long had a gift for taking the big abstract nouns — history, power, state, nation, morality, responsibility — and dragging them onto the stage until they have to justify themselves in front of an audience. Which is only fair. They have been getting away with quite a lot for centuries.

The title carries a sly double meaning too. These are not merely plays about history. They are plays about the making of contemporary history, the sort of near-past and immediate present in which politicians, journalists, officials and assorted well-spoken operators busily shape the world while pretending events are simply unfolding of their own accord. Hare’s genius is to show that “history” is often just people in rooms, saying confident things, misunderstanding each other, protecting themselves, and occasionally ruining a country before lunch.

And that, really, is where the fun begins. Hare is wonderfully alert to the gap between public language and private motive — between what is said for the record and what is actually going on beneath the polished surface. This makes his work ideal for readers who enjoy drama with brains, bite and a strong suspicion that systems are held together by rhetoric, habit and the occasional well-timed dinner invitation. If you like your theatre full of emotional fog and wistful pauses over teacups, you may need to brace yourself. Hare tends to arrive with sharper tools.

There is something deliciously ironic about reading political theatre in book form, too. Plays are meant to be spoken, embodied, argued through in light and space, yet there is also a special pleasure in encountering them on the page, where the machinery of thought is laid bare. You can see the architecture of the argument, the precision of the dialogue, the way whole climates of feeling and power are built out of words. It is theatre, yes, but theatre that knows ideas are actions and that conversations can be battlefields with better tailoring.

The 1984 publication date adds its own faintly perfect note. Britain in the early 1980s was hardly lacking in conflict, ideology, public theatre and large national questions presented in tones of certainty by people who often seemed alarmingly certain. A volume like this feels entirely of its moment and yet also annoyingly durable, because the subjects Hare worries away at — power, accountability, national self-deception, the pageantry of public life — have shown little sign of becoming obsolete. History, one learns, is very inconsiderate in that way.

This Good condition copy has the pleasing air of a serious paperback that has probably been owned by someone who wanted drama with substance rather than merely decorative anguish. It may have sat on a shelf beside other Faber volumes looking faintly superior, or been read by a student, a director, a political obsessive, or somebody who liked their literature to arrive armed. Either way, it has endured, which is more than can be said for many of the policies and convictions that likely hover in the background of its pages.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, whose modest name continues to undersell the goods with almost artistic commitment, this is an excellent find for readers who enjoy modern drama at its sharpest: politically alert, intellectually restless and suspicious of official narratives. The History Plays is for anyone who suspects that history is never merely “the past,” but an ongoing script written by flawed people in expensive rooms — and occasionally improved by a playwright determined not to let them off easily.

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