David Hare News

David Hare's updating of Ibsen's Peer Gynt has plenty to say about the world in 2019 - perhaps a little too much - but James McArdle's central performance and the sheer chutzpah of the concept and direction pulls it through.

PETER GYNT by David Hare after Henrik Ibsen plays at the National Theatre until 8 October, in a co-production with Edinburgh International Festival. See production photos

It's November 1998 on the World's End Estate in Chelsea. Energetic single mum Viv (Patricia Potter; Holby City) has just moved in with her shy, troubled son Ben (Tom Milligan; Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, West End), eager to start afresh and escape economic precarity. Next door, single father and painter-cum-security guard Ylli and his confident, yet enigmatic son Besnik are also negotiating their horizons, against the televised backdrop of catastrophe in their native Kosovo.

Joining the previously announced Juliet Stevenson and Ria Zmitrowicz are Oliver Alvin-Wilson, Nathalie Armin, Paul Higgins, Mariah Louca, Pamela Nomvete, Daniel Rabin, Joy Richardson, Kirsty Rider and Naomi Wirthner.

In a unique collaboration, a wide-ranging group of arts organisations and human rights charities commissioned Ai Weiwei to design a new flag in response to the real and present dangers of a world changing at break-neck speed and a community that has forgotten why human rights are so important, to offer hope and to educate generations to come about the absolute importance of universal human rights. Everyone across the country is invited to Fly The Flag for Human Rights between 24 and 30 June 2019 in events around the UK, with over 150 organisations involved.

Wiltshire Creative will premiere Barney Norris' explosive new adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding, retold in present-day Wiltshire, at Salisbury Playhouse in February as part of its 2019-20 Autumn Winter season.

Lovers of new theatre will gather this August for an advance look at tomorrow's hits at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's 2019 New Works Festival at Palo Alto's Lucie Stern Theatre. This unique festival offers audiences an extraordinary opportunity to experience new plays and musicals in their early stages of development, and hear about the creative process in a "Meet the Artists" panel discussion. With multiple performances of each work, playwrights and composers are able to revise and refine their shows during the festival, allowing audiences to view the exciting evolution of brand new pieces of theatre. The popular festival runs August 9 - 18, 2019 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Rd., Palo Alto. Festival passes ($65 general$49 season subscribers) and single event tickets ($20) can be purchased online at theatreworks.org or by calling (650) 463-1960.

The one-time highly controversial David Hare play still packs a punch and a message that seems, if anything, even more insistent in these Austerity / Brexit days.

David Hare's award-winning play roars to life in a provocative new site-specific staging performed in The Vaults, London's alternative subterranean venue beneath Waterloo Station, running from Friday 13 September - Sunday 17 November, with a press night on Thursday 19 September. This first revival of The Permanent Way since its award-winning run in York and then at the National Theatre in 2003 will be directed by Alexander Lass, nominated for Best Director at the 2017 Stage Debut awards, and whose credits include Associate Director on Shakespeare in Love at the Theatre Royal Bath and on tour, and on No Man's Land in the West End. Casting to be announced.

The National Theatre has announced 15 productions of new plays and fresh adaptations by leading writers.

Today the full programme of events has been announced around Fly The Flag, a major new project marking the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and brand new images of Ai Weiwei with young people have been released.

Jonathan Church, Artistic Director of Theatre Royal Bath's Summer Season 2019 today announces further casting for its upcoming programme of eight plays.

David Hare's THE BREATH OF LIFE tells the story of a meeting between Frances Beale, the ex-wife of hotshot lawyer Martin, and Madeleine Palmer, Martin's ex-mistress. Now in their 60s, the women reflect on their past and the future to come.

Moscow 1938. Not the best place to have a sense of humour, let alone a yearning for freedom.

Broadway actor Julia Brothers' will join Portland favorite Gretchen Corbett in David Hare's The Breath of Life, a two-woman play The Daily Telegraph called bitingly funny.

When is desire not enough? Former lovers are reunited and grapple with this and other questions in a new production of SKYLIGHT. From esteemed playwright David Hare, the play has graced the stages of the West End and Broadway and is now playing in Princeton, New Jersey. SKYLIGHT is the final show of director Emily Mann's penultimate season as artistic director and resident playwright of McCarter. SKYLIGHT opens with Kyra coming home to her dilapidated apartment with groceries. A schoolteacher in her thirties, Kyra lives alone without central heating and works with children who have been deemed by some as a lost cause, a charity case for someone with as much intelligence and talent as Kyra possesses.

The specific highs and lows---and all the cloudy, uneasy details in between---of a failed relationship are all picked apart and analyzed by a pair of distressed former lovers in British playwright David Hare's absorbing 1995 play SKYLIGHT, currently on stage at Anaheim's Chance Theater through May 19, 2019. Directed with an appealing yet captivating casualness by Chance Theater's own artistic director Oanh Nguyen, this excellent, beautifully-acted new local revival of the Olivier and Tony Award-winning drama focuses on a pair of deeply flawed individuals who have been trying their best to move on separately with their respective lives despite the deep scars that continue to haunt them. After three years apart, could a resuscitation of their past relationship be the key to put them both back in the right frame of mind again---or is their love unsalvageable?

On a bitterly cold London evening, schoolteacher Kyra Hollis (Mahira Kakkar) receives an unexpected visit from her former lover, Tom Sergeant (Greg Wood), a successful and charismatic restaurateur. As the evening progresses, the two attempt to rekindle their once passionate relationship with food and wine, only to find themselves locked in a dangerous battle of opposing ideologies and mutual desires.

On a bitterly cold London evening, schoolteacher Kyra Hollis (Mahira Kakkar) receives an unexpected visit from her former lover, Tom Sergeant (Greg Wood), a successful and charismatic restaurateur. As the evening progresses, the two attempt to rekindle their once passionate relationship with food and wine, only to find themselves locked in a dangerous battle of opposing ideologies and mutual desires.

Portland favorites Gretchen Corbett and Sharonlee McLean take the stage beginning May 4 to star in David Hare's The Breath of Life, a two-woman play The Daily Telegraph called "bitingly funny." When Francis Beale (McLean) decides she wants one last word with her ex-husband's ex-lover (Corbett), both women are forced to confront their past, their failed relationships, dashed ideals and the lens through which they choose to view their futures. Ken Rus Schmoll (readings in six of the last ten JAW Festivals at The Armory, productions at Playwrights Horizons and New York Theatre Workshop) will direct.